Re: Buy a PC at Best Buy today and plug it in - how long till I get a virus?

From: Robert Moir (bofh_at_mvps.org)
Date: 05/03/04 

Date: Mon, 3 May 2004 22:24:07 +0100

BeamGuy wrote:
> Kind of as an aside - I was one of the last of my generation to buy a
> home PC because I feared that after spending heaps of my own personal
> money to purchase it I would not know how to provide the support that
> my IT department normally gave me. I eventually over the years
> learned how to support it myself, and in fact now help my IT
> department support the other users in my company.

Sounds good to me, who better to know your needs and your neighbours whether
at home or at work than you right there with them?

> I make my living as part of the computer industry - so I fear the day
> that the average grandmother wakes up and decides that they no longer
> can maintain a functioning computer in their household and that the
> phone is a better way to keep in touch with the grand kids. I know
> you are in the business of maintaining the security of large
> corporations with thousands of computers all interconnected, but
> please keep in mind that there are almost as many slightly older PCs
> in the hands of grandmothers who barely know how to open an email
> program or type in a URL to their browser. If you talk about security
> patches to them you will just get a blank look, and it is pointless
> anyway since they would need to spend about 3 days with the dialup
> connection to download everything they need. How are you going to
> keep them from infecting your big corporate customers? And by the
> way, why do you think that they would want to allow a user from
> singapore to login to their system anyway?

I know. Believe me, I do. This is what would keep me awake at night
worrying, if i wasn't already spending all day worrying about it.

The fact is, there is no easy answer. Even assuming that ADSL or Cable or
whatever was available *everywhere*, and we're a long long way from that
yet, telling someone who is otherwise happy to be on a dial up connection to
upgrade to a more expensive 'broadband' connection just so that they can
download patches is a non-starter. Its obscene to tell someone they need to
spend that extra money and hassle because the operating system that was sold
to them is, essentially, faulty.

Switching operating systems isn't the answer. I've got an Apple Mac laptop
at home as well and this needs updates on about a monthly basis, not so
different from the Windows machine, and I used to run a "virtual machine"
with Red Hat Linux on it, and that was the same as the other two if not
actually worse. As these systems all sell, it seems we're all happy to pay
for "meh... good enough" instead of waiting and maybe paying more for "solid
effort". What we save in having "good enough, today" instead of "totally
solid, tomorrow" it seems we end up paying for in update inconveniances.

Right now, I don't have a proper answer. I think things are getting better,
but is it enough and is it fast enough?

Thanks for an interesting discussion by the way!

Regards
Rob

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