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Do I Need Virus Protection?
- Thread starter modernart
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If you email with Windows people, it's courteous. But as long as you don't do anything stupid, it won't affect your Macintosh.
Yes, but if you work for a company that has Windows computers then you should get it. Some colleges require it and what not. But, selfishly speaking as long as you don't run Windows you should be fine.
Yes.
Yes.
There are no viruses for Mac OS X, only trojans and malware.
But protections against those should be your mind, as they need to be installed manually, and you have to put in your password so that they can even work.
I've convinced most of my family and friends to switch to Mac for a number of reasons, but at the top of the list is because they won't have to worry about virus protection. It's painful trying to lend support for their old PC's that are slowing to a crawl after years of virus and malware bogging their systems down. Since switching them to Mac, their lives and my life are easier!
When you run Windows run everything you did before to protect yourself on the Windows side of the computer. You are safe on the Macs side...
The odds are very, very small of getting infected with any Mac malware. Therefore, IF you have a complete backup of your hard drive that you update regularly (use Carbon Copy Cloner, or the paid version of SuperDuper!), then you really don't need anti-virus. If you ever did get infected, you could simply wipe your drive and boot from your other drive, then dupe again back to the original drive and keep on trucking. (I would suggest having your computer backup your hard drive daily at night automatically.)
PS I run a PC along with three Macs and I have never run anti-virus at all on the PC and I've never had any trouble. Perhaps it is because I am behind a router with a firewall, then run everything through opendns, then run from that router to a switch, then to the four computers. Maybe the computers are not "seen" on the internet, but I really don't know (and don't care--I don't have ANY crucial data on the PC and only use it for kids games and what not.)
If I am being stupid, please tell me.
PS I run a PC along with three Macs and I have never run anti-virus at all on the PC and I've never had any trouble. Perhaps it is because I am behind a router with a firewall, then run everything through opendns, then run from that router to a switch, then to the four computers. Maybe the computers are not "seen" on the internet, but I really don't know (and don't care--I don't have ANY crucial data on the PC and only use it for kids games and what not.)
If I am being stupid, please tell me.
I'd do it if I were running Windoze. Adding it to the Mac partition will only add layers that can be exploited by any future attack. There's like a million threads and news stories about this, however don't believe the ones on Cnet. CBS makes them post crap.