What is the difference between virus and a bug?

Question

I hear this word bug from IT professionals, what is it actually? N what's the difference between virus and bug? And plzz give suggestions on how can I prevent my gadgets getting affected by these villains;-)

Answer 1

Computer Virus

A computer virus is a small software program that spreads from one computer to another computer and that interferes with computer operation. A computer virus may corrupt or delete data on a computer, use an e-mail program to spread the virus to other computers, or even delete everything on the hard disk.



Computer viruses are most easily spread by attachments in e-mail messages or by instant messaging messages. Therefore, you must never open an e-mail attachment unless you know who sent the message or unless you are expecting the e-mail attachment. Computer viruses can be disguised as attachments of funny images, greeting cards, or audio and video files. Computer viruses also spread by using downloads on the Internet. Computer viruses can be hidden in pirated software or in other files or programs that you may download.



Bug

An error or defect in software or hardware that causes a program to malfunction. Often a bug is caused by conflicts in software when applications try to run in tandem. According to folklore, the first computer bug was an actual bug. Discovered in 1945 at Harvard, a moth trapped between two electrical relays of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator caused the whole machine to shut down.



for further info go to



http://support.microsoft.com/kb/129972

Answer 2

2

Answer 3

A bug is a coding error in a piece of software. Bugs can be serious and cause a program to crash or can be trivial and cause a minor annoyance.



e.g. A bug in a piece of software may cause the software to crash and exit if a user entered a letter instead of a numeric value. The programmer should have anitcipated the user would do this and put code in to tell the user that they must enter a number instead of crashing.



A Virus is a piece of malicious code which is designed to spread from system to system and disrupt the users activities.



e.g. A user goes on a website and unknowingly downloads a virus, which redirects all their web browsing to **** sites. The user cannot browse the internet normally without their request being redirected.

Answer 4

Hi,



Bug is simply an unknown and non anticipated behaviour of a piece of code of a software like Microsoft windows XP originally can support upto 127 GB then this bug was removed by the introduction of SP1.



Whereas Virus is piece of code written to force a software to malfunction for example Win32 blaster virus was written for shutting down the system by exploiting windows components.



I hope this clear your confusion.



Regards

David

Answer 5

Bugs are just little problems with a program or some code. Nothing serious just a minor annoyance from somebody not paying enough attention or having an accident.



Viruses are malicious bits of code which were purposefully designed to cause damage to a system and replicate themselves throughout other computers.