Interesting article over at the Mail Online about the so-called Windows 7 “black screen of death”. Even more interesting is the comments where the forever OS snobbery war continues.
People saying “Get a Mac”, or “My Mac has never seen a virus” are far too complacement for my liking. In the six years of working in an industry where Macs are the dominant platform for creatives (followed behind by Linux – yaaboosucks to Microsoft!), I’ve seen Macs become infected by trojans – installed by users who have unwittingly given the trojan access to their system by giving it their admin user password (which is usually only required for major system operations, such as installing kernel extensions or amending system configs). This has resulted in an compromised system – and this is because the users have usually downloaded something from a dodgy (warez, illegal torrent, etc.) web site and believed their Macs were invulnerable to viruses, etc.
The same can be said of some Windows users. Despite the almost universal paranoia of Windows systems getting viruses, I’ve also seen some Windows think along the same lines of the smug Mac owners in that “I’m careful – I’ve never caught a virus before and therefore do not need anti-virus software”. Subsequently their machines have been compromised and it’s re-install time. NEVER think you will be affected because one day you’ll most likely be kicking yourself.
Regardless of whatever platform you use – it’s always worth having some form of anti-virus/anti-malware software installed (free or otherwise) to ensure that you’ve got some warning about the new application you’ve just aquired will do. Never willingly grant strange applications access to your system and always verify their source first.
Mac users – I highly recommend Sophos Anti-Virus. Despite a few wibbly moments which have since been ironed out, Sophos is one of the most trusted and respected security vendors for all the major OS platforms. Certainly, I’ve been very impressed with their Windows products in the past when I’ve used them. For Windows users, I do not hestiate to recommend ESET NOD32 Anti-Virus.
Another thing that bugs me are people who do not take care of their system backups. It’s now so incredibly cheap to buy an external hard drive, CDs, DVDs or Blu-Ray rewritables to back up all of your sensitive data. And add to this the numerous onlne backup services (my favourite being SquirrelSave – but then again I provide the majority of support for this as I work for Memset who own and run it!) and you’ve got no excuse for losing data.
