This is why I Love my iBook!

One of the things I do on the side is to do personal consulting for friends and colleagues. Yesterday, I received a call from one colleague and was informed that his nephew's laptop seems to be infected with "something". Now, since I don't have the problematic laptop in front of me, I guess that the "something" that's in the laptop *may* either be a worm or a trojan -- either way, its definitely a Malware infection. This colleague is asking me on what remedy his nephew can do to fix the problem with the computer.

Here's what I recommended him to do:

If possible, download and run an application called "Spybot Search & Destroy" -- an application that scans a system for Adware or Spyware. Once resident, this program also monitors system activities and reports on suspicious behaviour of any running programs or processes.

Run an anti-virus from a clean partition. This can be done if his nephew can somehow boot up the system cleanly and run an anti-virus from an external (either USB or Firewire) hard drive.

Once the system was cleaned (though based on the scenario given this may be a bit of an impossibility), apply Windows XP Service Pack 2 and enable Windows Firewall. Windows Firewall will prevent future malware infection by blocking unused yet exploitable ports in the computer.

Never ever use Internet Explorer ever again. At least 60% of malware infection goes into the system through Internet Explorer. The best alternative for this is any Mozilla-based web browser.

Never use Outlook or Outlook Express as a mail client. The around 30% of malware infection comes into the system through both variants of MS Outlook. There are a lot of reputable free mail client applications available for download and they are not as vulnerable as Outlook. Examples of these are Thunderbird, the ever-reliable Eudora, etc.

...

Times like these, I'm really thankful that I'm using a Mac. I've been using my iBook for almost 3 years now and I have not installed any anti-virus of any kind, yet its as "clean as a whistle" with nary a malware infection of any kind.