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You have that important assignment with its impending deadline ticking away and you have sweated for a few days to pull your data together.

When you sign in to your computer, you notice that your recently purchased mouse must be clicked several times before it follows your command. Not a good sign, still you shrug the incident off, enthused to get your report started and in your boss's in-box.

The cursor jumps of its own volition and when you open the keyboard, it begrudgingly gives you each letter at a time, very slowly. The operations administrator is in her weekly conference and by the time the meeting is finished, your boss will be looking for a status report on your assignment in his morning mail. Your co-workers haven't a clue what to do and you're once again left to your own resourcefulness.

Check first to be certain that your security system has been updated and that the update has been distributed.

Your next measure should be to access your security system from the Start Menu. Once you have its software's dialog box on screen, it's easy to scan your computer to detect possible threats as a result of malware or hackers or viruses that often find e-mail attachments as likely escorts into your computer.

With most security systems, you can separately run one of three types of scans. Start by scanning the Start-up Objects. Follow with a scan of the Critical Areas. If neither scan detects a threat, go ahead and scan My Computer. This may take a little longer but it is well worth the investigation. Usually, if your operation administrator has performed these duties, the security software will let you know there is no need to re-scan. If you don't get such a notification once you try to scan, it's reasonable to run the selected scan.

Should either scan find a threat of any kind, most security systems will prompt you as to the specific activity to take to neutralize the offending threat. Simply follow the prompters your system gives you.

Should the scans all result in positive findings, close the security system dialog box, and then return to the Start Menu.

By clicking on Programs, first select Accessories, then System Tools, and finally Disk Clean-up. In this dialog box, the prompter may ask if you are sure you wish to perform the clean-up. The first time you do this, you may want to review each item that is slated for clean-up to decide if you wish to delete one or several of the tasks from your clean-up list. If unsure about any task, remove the check mark from

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