Originally posted by: Thin Lizzy
I was wanting maybe a gaming machine, because my Mac cannot handle some games I want to play, such as Unreal Tournament 2004. Very jumpy on my Mac. I might just give up on it though. The reason is, I have others who like to play games too. My sister likes to play The Sims, and for some reason, they have to disable Norton to play it. They will use the PC for internet to, and forget to enable Norton, and eventually get Viruses. This happened to my bro's Home Built PC. He had Norton disabled for one day, because my sis was playing the Sims, and then she went on the internet. And the next day, his PC was infected by 8 viruses.
God I always hear this garbage mac people are ranting all the time "PCs get Viruses blah blah blah". Well FYI I have a computer I go on the internet all the time with NO Firewall and NO Antivirus scanner, and after about a year I STILL dont have any viruses or spyware. Yes I get the occasional tracking cookie but WHO CARES! I have ad-aware on my system and thats it. I run it once a month and the only things that get detected are tracking cookies. The only reason why IE is "soo horrible" is because people let it get horrible. Just like an improperly configured firewall, if a virus (trojan) requests to make an outbound connection and since your sooo used to clicking away at what ever pops up and you click ok, then that firewall is useless. Yes some things CAN be installed with out IE telling you but you know what you should do? CONFIGURE IT! Just to be on the safe side, I have it notify me every time a script wants to be run/downloaded. I have other machines where they are configured similarly but aren't notified about EVERYTHING and they still don't have any viruses. Some might say "well you probably have one right now and don't know about it" well thats what I started to get worried about after 7 months of doing this. So I spent about 5 hours scanning it remotely,over the internet and installing a virus scanner but none could be found. So I did a system restore and I have the system back to the way it was before I did all that scanning and installing. Also it helps to check MSCONFIG and looking in the registry for suspicious programs but thats border line paranoia. Every time I go to my cousin's house I dont even need a virus scanner, they have one but they don't update it. I search through MSCONFIG and the registry and I am able to pull out at least 9 viruses. Virus scanners are overrated, they were useful back in the day of crafty viruses or if you didn't know where to look for viruses. Virus detection is just plain common sense, I mean one time on my cousin's computer I found a file called Brasil.pif (Forgot wat virus it was) so I deleted it. Checked MS Config and found hundreds of these starting up. Removed it and that was the end of that.
To summ it up, yes PCs do have some holes to fix, but there are quite not as many holes as mac people claim there are. Anything improperly configured can get viruses or spyware or any of that other crap, but if you set it up right, its pretty good about keeping them out.
And thats my two cents.