Comments on: Virus pain

By: Susabelle

Susabelle — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 14:16:45 +0000

I am like you, the three machines I use personally and never let anyone touch (two laptops and a big Dell running Vista) have no virus protection on them and I’ve never been infected. I occasionally run adaware or spybot or one of the others, but never a virus-checking program. I’ve been running this way on my home machine(s) for at least 15 years.

On the four other machines on my home network (one for hubby and one for each of the kids) they are locked down tight with virus software and auto-run adaware and spybot twice a week in the middle of the night. If I didn’t do that, I’d be rebuilding those darned machines every other day, I think. It’s a lot less headache to keep them locked down.

I have no protection at all on my print server, but it has no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse, it just sits in the corner and runs and I’ve had no problems. Of course we are behind a firewall, as well, that helps.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:50:41 +0000

Greg,

There are historical reasons for that PC being windows, mainly to do with when I used to have time to play games. When this system needs replacing it will almost certainly be either a Mac mini or an iMac.

As I am posting from the Commonwealth (Australia to be precise) please excuse me using the correct spelling

I paid for the grey tyres with a cheque.
If you steal jewellery you go to gaol.

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:10:15 +0000

Hey, Todd -

I would get calls several times a week when our main computer at home was a Windows box, from either my wife or the kids. I finally made the executive decision to switch us over to either Mac OS X or Linux (I went first with Fedora, then later with Ubuntu which proves to be more incredible with each release). Since switching over, we’ve had nary a virus, malware, or any other digital bug-a-boo to contend with along the way. Our main family computer is a Mac mini running Tiger (debating on whether to upgrade or not). My wife’s laptop and my daughter’s desktop both run Ubuntu. My son has a gaming PC, but we keep the virus checker running and updated.

So, you might want to put:
4. Windows sucks at digital security, so thank goodness we have choices for general computing uses.

BTW, in the States, we spell it “realiZation” (the ‘s’ is for the UK and commonwealth folks).