This is a common question, and there is only one answer to it. Unfortunately, there is no panacea against PC virus infection, nor can there be ever one. ADinf seems to be the best virus detector today. But bear in mind its capabilities and limitations. Let us examine the situations where ADinf may keep quite.

• First, if you have installed ADinf on an already infected machine, it will not notice any virus, because it detects viruses through the changes in file information. And in our case there are no changes in file information and so it does not alert you. If the virus is hiding its presence, i.e., you have a stealth virus in the machine; ADinf will certainly detect it, if you run under the STEALTH SEARCH mode. This is a very useful mode and run ADinf from time to time under this mode.

• Second, ADinf may fail to notice the viruses tailored specifically to infect a file only at the time of creation. If they are additionally hiding themselves, you may trap them, running ADinf in STEALTH SEARCH mode. If they are NOT hiding their presence, you can easily detect them with your naked eyes. For example, suppose you are copying a file from drive A to drive C and you notice that the source file has a different size than the target file. You can easily detect such infectors, running ADinf as follows: write a batch file (call it TRAP) which copies several executable files, say, to your RAM drive and then copies them back from the RAM drive to the source drive. Run the TRAP batch file before turning off your computer. When you start the computer next time, ADinf will report about such viruses, if any. For greater reliability, you better include files to be copied in STABLE FILES list.

• Third, ADinf permits to toggle off many checks. If you, for example, have toggled off check of boot sector of drive C or you have deleted COM or EXE from extension list for control, you may not notice virus-inducted changes.

• Finally, because of its beneficent policy aggressive strategy and ingenious tactics ADinf irritates to virus designers. One fine day it is not excepted that you may find a new virus specially tailored to dodge the ADinf in your machine. Today there are several viruses which try to delete files with a name begining with "ADIN". What will these evil-mongers do further, God alone knows.