anokajim's Profile

Excellent analogies. And it is definitely something I tell my Windows using friends considering the move to the Mac; that they do not need antivirus software and can save themselves that up-front and monthly cost. It's also important to tell anyone using a computer, regardless of operating system, that there are some general rules about internet usage. One of them is don't give your admin password to ANYONE or any program unless it's a trusted program from a trusted source. Some people dish that info out and still expect their computer to be 100% secure from all evils. And of course the OS maker gets blamed. As a side note, if viruses do show up someday, there's still a free option: ClamX AV. Free download, free updates, and it doesn't run unless invoked, like any other application you have in your Applications folder. I've got it and have used it once to scan an email attachment going to a ton of Windows users. Otherwise, it sits there in the folder, idle, wasting no processor cycles, waiting to be called upon again.

And don't forget to run the standard *NIX maintainence scripts. Apple has them set up by default to run at odd hours of the day and if you have a portable this is problematic. To get around this, I use an absolutely fabulous app called Macaroni (www.atomicbird.com). It installs a preference pane that runs the 4 major maintainence scripts (repair permissions, log rotations, updating whereis and locate database) and also has another setting that allows you to remove all the localization files. It saved GIGS of space on my HDD. And the beauty of all this: the process is automated. You never have to remember to run the daily, weekly, or monthly scripts. It does them for you in the background with absolutely no performance hit. Very highly recommended.