Re: [NTLK] mac or not to mac, or how much PC really costs

From: Laurent Daudelin (Laurent_Daudelin_at_fanniemae.com)
Date: Wed Oct 06 2004 - 07:09:50 PDT


On 06/10/04 09:49, "LAG" <lagoff11_at_yahoo.com> wrote:

> I AM SORRY that your pc experience was so frustrating. i must say that your
> experience is not the norm and im not sure where you got your pc or what you
> told them you needed it for. im sure had you spoke to a qualified person, not
> just a tech, they would have asked you more questions before you purchased
> the pc and let you know what to do. it seems you went into this without
> proper research before hand as to what you needed from your pc. may your imac
> work forever. ill stick to pc's.

Well, I don't agree that his experience is not the norm. My wife insisted on
getting a brand new Dell over a year ago. Since then, her machine has been
going down the hill in terms of crap that has been creeping through the
various opened holes. Right from the beginning, she got Norton Antivirus, so
she started having all those messages asking her if it was OK to let such
and such file access such and such function or part of the system, whatever.
I know because she never knew what to do and would call me over and over and
over, despite the warning I gave her when she decided to proceed with that
Dell. Of course, I always tried to make the right decision whenever one of
those message would come up. I didn't want her machine to become a zombie
and grab all our Internet bandwidth by becoming the slave of some hacker.

Still, after a little bit over a year now, her machine, a Pentium 4 3.2GHz,
is now slower than molasse in January. When I was logging in at the
beginning, it would take just a few seconds to get into my administrator
account. Now, it takes between 20 and 30 seconds before I can start doing
something useful.

Now, some may say again that this is yet another isolated case. Not so! At
the office where I work, we're all, of course, using PCs running Windows
2000 Pro. There isn't a frigging week where we don't have to install some
patch of some sort. And remember, we have an industrial strenght firewall to
protect all our PCs. Nevertheless, now and then, there are always machines
that will fall to the legions of zombies, malware, spyware, not to mention
virus.

So, yes, when I was reading John's message, I exactly knew what he was
talking about and I would not discard his story as an "isolated" one. I
think that people regularly using PCs running Windows that don't have those
problems whether don't know that their machine is a zombie, or they are the
exception to the rule...

-Laurent.

-- 
========================================================================
Laurent Daudelin                 Developer, Multifamily, ESO, Fannie Mae
mailto:Laurent_Daudelin_at_fanniemae.com                Washington, DC, USA
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