Quote Originally Posted by RSL
Oh yeah, Windows is crap because I mistreat it. I say harsh things about it and kick it every once in awhile. No wonder it crashes and allows a different worm every month to exploit it! I suppose I'll start feeding it milk and cookies and reading it a bedtime story at night. Hopefully we'll start a good relationship after this.

Don't feed it cookies.

And actually, yeah, you are mistreating it in a number of ways.

1) No or inadequate firewall
2) No or inadequate antivirus protection
3) No or inadequate use of Windows Update

And possibly:
4) Opening of email attachments without adequate verification of authenticity
5) Use of Outlook Express

A router is an adequate firewall even if you don't spend any time configuring it. XPee's built-in Internet Connection firewall is inadequate, as is ZoneAlarm, which causes more problems than it fixes.

Norton Antivirus or AVG is adequate antivirus protection if you have automatic updates turned on. McAffee is not. Yes, it was, once, but those days are gone. Network Associates dropped the ball. Symantec hasn't so far, and AVG's actually better in a lot of ways than Norton--being free, for example.

Windows update: Update early. Update often. Turn on automatic updates.

I see virus/worm alerts left, right, and center, and I just laugh. MyDoom? Sasser? RPC? What's all that crap? The only reason I even know it exists is because there are users out there who don't take even the simplest of precautions, and then act surprised when they get infected. I turn on my monitor every morning to see that nice comforting row of red zeroes that says that nothing even made it far enough to hit my antivirus scanner.

People who spew hate at XP just do it because they don't know how to use the OS. One would spew hate at a table saw, too, if one cut off a thumb or, say, genitals, but the fact is the table saw is only intended to cut, it's not intended to be mommy and daddy. You put wood on, the saw cuts it. You put body parts on, the saw cuts those, too. When you do something really stupid, Windows will usually come up with a little dialog box that says "Hey, man, are you really sure you want to stick your finger in there?" The saw just cuts it off.

Switch to Linux? Go ahead! Chances are, you don't know how to use that, either. Have a blast! You think it's hard to learn to do things in Windows? You're going to love the command prompt, especially if you can't spell--and this means 80-90% of the EoFF audience. Also especially fun is the no-prompts Linux philosophy--Made for power users who know what they're doing. It's great if you know that you don't really want to cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda0, but what if you're some newbie who can't even master the use of "their" versus "there," and doesn't know which witch is which? You tell Linux to rape your partition table, it just rapes away, without the Microsoft prompt that says "Hey, man, that's really *arf*ing dumb. Are you sure you want to do it?"