How do I tell a real virus alert from a false one?

One time I got a pop-up from XP-Antivirus telling me that I had several viruses. I ALMOST installed it but then I saw what it said:





';Install for FREE';





I got suspicious and canceled at the last minute.





How do I tell a real virus warning from a false one?





THANKS!!!! :DHow do I tell a real virus alert from a false one?
Only the anti-virus program that you have installed on your computer can alert you that you have a virus ( or some other malware.





Your computer itself, or Windows itself, cannot alert you to any malware. Nor will it ever attempt to sell your some solution to ';fix'; the problem.





A website that you are visiting can also not detect a virus or other malware.





If you have not installed XP-Anti-virus on your computer, then you cannnot trust its alerts. If you DO have , lets say Norton anti-virus installed then you CAN trust it.How do I tell a real virus alert from a false one?
What do you mean XP-Antivirus? Microsoft so far only launch Windows Live Care for antivirus, I believe it's a suspicious popup telling you to go their webpage. Just ignore it
You must have gone to some of those web sites. Get a good antivirus. AVG is free.
The first thing , you need to have one and only one good anti-virus and anti-spyware, such as AVG, Norton or Kaspersky





The second, you need to update the anti-virus and anti-spy ware periodically or even daily





The third is you need to turn on your WinXP SP2 firewall.





Then, you can discuss the alert message. If there is a message, you need to at least doing a smart scanning on your system. Also you need to do a full scanning per week.





Although it is very complicated, it saved you to care about the reality of the alert.





If you find that is too time consuming, you should use Mac.
If you got that alert from a web browser popup, it's pretty much false all of the time. However, if you got that alert from Windows, then you probably are infected with malware already.





A good rule of thumb is that real alerts generally include a specific file name such as saying ';file c:\folder\file.ext was infected with Virusname.11234'; or something similar, if the alert just says things like ';Your system is infected with viruses'; it's almost always fake.





Also, if the name of the program that popped up was WinAntiVirus or WinFixer, or ErrorSafe, or a few others, you definitely are infected.





Two good programs for removing spyware and adware are Super Anti Spyware, and Spybot Search %26amp; Destroy.





Their URLS are: http://www.superantispyware.com/ and http://www.safer-networking.org/ respectively.





(All you need from SuperAntiSpyware is the free version for home users)
If the anti virus software that is installed on your PC alerts you it's real, if something pops up telling you that you have viruses, undesirable content in your internet history etc and offers to install the software that will fix it the chances are it's false and is just to sell you something.
yea its a gimmick those programs use to get you to install their programs-all you can do is trust your program to do the job until you get infection it cant get out