Reference: New Computer

[OkeeDon]

Taking your comments at face value, then WinXP is the way for me to go - like many others here on TBN, I'm networked at home -- currently, 5 computers, although 2 are old ones about to be taken off line once I finish milking them dry.

My router, and most others, has a hardware firewall. I've been on the sites where they will (with your permission) poke into your connection and try to find vulnerabilities. The report is that my computers don't exist -- total stealth. You can't get past the firewall unless I open up something.

Viruses that can open ports can sneak in through email. I have Norton scan everything and I open nothing unless I know where it came from. Still, I have had the occasional virus sneak in through a web site -- Norton has caught them and quarantined them. These are vulnerabilities in the browser and the email handling program, not in the OS (although, for all intents and purposes, IE is part of XP, now). They can take over 98, also -- I had to junk one hard drive that had a virus hidden on the boot sector or some other outside track, where it couldn't be reformatted. It re-infected everything I put back on it.

WinXP is stable, and if a program does crash, you can usually recover without rebooting. 98 can't do that. That's enough for me. XP is based on NT/2000, and has the stability built-in and improved. 98 is lightweight in comparison. XP may be bigger (and thus "heavier" in your terms), but it's because it does more. I use both XP Home and XP Pro, and find them equally good. I wouldn't go back to 98 for love nor money. I've been using personal computers since 1979, made my living with them for many years, and am considered moderately knowledgeable.

 

[sendero]

</font><font color="blue" class="small">( <font color="blueclass=small"> The only reason that Microsoft has as many problems as they do, the hackers only go after them almost exclusively.</font> )</font>

As a professional Windows programmer of 12+ years, I'll have to disagree with you.

MS has these hack problems because NT (what the XP OS is really) was written before the internet was popular and because MS has tried to "add in" security to an OS that had next to none in the original design. Like "adding quality", "adding security" is an iffy proposition at best.

MS did not help itself in this regard when it integrated the browser into the OS desktop (for legal rather than technical reasons), allowing scripts and macros to run amok. Plus - among the most common exploits are of the "buffer overrun" type, a type that can only be used against very amateurishly written code (ie you can't overrun a buffer on a properly constructed program).

MS is rapidly losing support in the corporate world for critical applications because of this. Every time one of these **** viruses come along, it costs thousands of dollars of lost productivity. Yet the Linux servers in the same IT depts are not affected. Managers put 2 and 2 together.

My wife is a manager of support for a medium (150 or so computers) sized IT office. This is a very vexing problem for them, because often the patches MS puts out to plug up these holes causes new problems. Nasty situation all around.

One last thing - you say that virus writers want notoriety but what most of them want is anonymity. If they get caught, they are in a lot of trouble. Fact is, writing viruses for Windows is easy, the last few perps that have been caught are anything but high-level hackers. It really is more like what police call it when you leave your keys in a running car to pop into the 7-11, i.e. an 'attractive nuisance'.