On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 11:32 -0700, Richard C. Steffens wrote: > A friend has asked me to help with cleaning off an older computer of > theirs. Over the years their son downloaded lots of stuff without > knowing too much about the safety of each site he visited. > > The machine is some flavor of Windows -- might be Win98 or XP. They have > some data they want to keep. My thought is to network their machine to > my laptop and copy those files. Then, I could reload Windows for them. > (I don't think I could talk them into Linux.) > > My wife is concerned about contaminating my laptop with viruses. I told > her that Windows viruses don't affect Linux, but she isn't convinced. > She asked me to ask all of you, and that she'll go along with your > recommendations. > > Any thoughts?
One possible risk -- does your Linux laptop run any form of WINE, e.g. code weavers stuff or anything that includes stuff from a Microsoft code base? There's an article from linux.com on the subject, ref http://www.linux.com/feature/42031 , but the site is down at the moment. (It can be found from the google cache.) If not, then you can safely tell your wife that Linux is built differently -- it's like a virus is the big bad wolf, Windows is built with hay, and Linux is built with bricks. Thanks, Mike _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
