A Candy For My Mac Friends

I've occasionally slurred the good name (cough) of Apple, and while I know none of my Mac using friends took it too seriously, I thought I'd offer up this link, The Security Awareness Blog, where the main poster has moved his company off of Wintel boxes for good, and chosen Apple for it's reliability and security.

One of the things he mentioned got me, though:

I want my computer to function every time I turn it on.

WinTel platforms don’t work anymore – at least not reliably. More than anything else, I need my box to work. I don’t need it to crash while giving a PowerPoint presentation to the Canadian Parliament or the ABA. I don’t need Word to crash after writing the last irretrievably 12 brilliant paragraphs. I don’t need IE to crash because the memory handling in Windows is so poor*. And so it goes with a global litany of crashes that require reboot or memory cleansing every day.

*Do this. Open IE. Look at Processes in Task Manager and see how much RAM is being used. Now open a whole bunch of IE windows and watch the memory get eaten up. Now, close all of the IE windows and see how much RAM you are now using.

Okay. We all know Windows sucks. Period. I'm certainly not going to defend Windows as an OS, ever. And certainly "working" shouldn't be too high a bar to set. But I've found a number of ways to avoid the most obnoxious problems in Windows. The first, for Internet users, is never, ever, ever use Internet Explorer. To use the old Information Superhighway metaphor, IE is an offramp right in to your bedroom - it's so bound up with Windows that an attack on IE is pretty much by definition an attack on everything in your computer. And besides the security concerns, IE just plain sucks. Download Firefox, and use that. Thunderbird works pretty well for email and RSS feeds (though not perfectly.) These two programs should import your IE and outlook settings without any trouble (though I haven't used IE in so long, I couldn't say for sure.) Finally, download Grisofts free anti-virus software. It scans all incoming email and other files. It's probably the least-hassle anti-virus software I've used, but I've never had any problems with it and a lot of the techie people I know reccomend it over classics like Norton Anti-virus. Update it frequently, though. I can tell you stories...

While I'm software-whoring, a special tip just for the ladies bloggers: If you're a blogspot user, download w.bloggar. It's a much simpler, more versatile tool than blogger's Dashboard. It gives you a much wider range of options, and generally lets you write "cleaner" posts that don't get chewed up by Blogger's crappy interface as much.

In any case, I've found Windows to be remarkable stable (even when I was using ME) just by not using IE. Of course, the biggest problem doesn't have a software fix - don't download and run things you don't recognize. And for the porn addicts among you, don't click "yes" on any movie file that asks for a license or DRM prompt. Just don't. Having had to clean up my computer brother's computer (yeah... that's the ticket) after that, it's just too much pain. Besides, there's plenty of safer ways of getting your fix.