--- In digitalradio@yahoogroups.com, Phil Barnett <ph...@...> wrote: > It's not a secret that Windows systems are swiss cheese because of this > whole group of issues. Closing our eyes to these problems doesn't make them > go away. Running Windows without third party malware or virus protection > will lead you to a disaster in a short amount of time. This is common > knowledge.
One thing that is irritating about Windows is the number of people who say "My Windows is running just fine!" who in fact are spewing spam, viruses, and malware to the Internet because they were virused years ago but never noticed it. Most viruses today don't tell you they're installed and don't slow your machine down enough to notice, due to most of today's machines being so fast. The only way you know if you have one is if you have a network security sniffer like Snort on your network that detects a sudden surge in malware traffic or network probes coming from your machine. One of the more recent Windows viruses even includes a wifi password cracker in it that runs and tries to crack the passwords of all the other wifi networks within listening distance of your laptop and then sends spam using *that* network to try to avoid detection. I had a less secure password on one of my Wifi hotspots and got bit by that one... it suddenly started spewing spam, and all I could do was turn it off and unplug it because the spam was coming from outside my apartment, not from any of my own machines (which at the time was a Ubuntu server and a Macbook running MacOS Leopard). I've been running Windows 7 recently, and thus far it appears to be good, security-wise and stability-wise. User interface is clunky and kludgy, but Ubuntu has that same problem. In the past I didn't have much luck with Linux on laptops, mostly because of wifi and Bluetooth issues -- most of the popular chips weren't supported and it was hard to enter your SSID and passphrase for encryption. That appears to have (mostly) changed, but as others suggested, using Ubuntu's "Live CD" version is a good idea before you go wiping your disk.
