this mac person is afraid of the pc flu

[whyrichard]

I know this is a silly topic to post on this forum...

... but i've been a mac person since 1984 for my past seven computers and i really don't want to venture into any pc forums yet... sceptical of their usefullness...

I have finallysuccumbed to the designers plight and bought a pc!
it is an xi computer, dual amd 64 opteron... very nice all around...

but i'm afraid to hook it up to the internet.

i don't really have to, i think... i have a klm switcher to switch between the mac and the pc... the mac will be online through ethernet... and i hope i can network wirelessly to share files between the mac and pc using 801.11g.



what do you guys think? is this overboard?

if i were to connect to pc to the internet, which i don't really want to do because it is just for design and i don't want it to be encumbered with strange spamware etc, but if i have to for whatever reason... what is the best way for me to do so?

firewall up... download firefox... what else? i don't know anything about pc protection.



thanks,



r.

 

[Dr. Dastardly]

Firewall and Firefox is a great start. And an anti virus certainly wont hurt either. But if your not visiting questionalbe sites then its really not that big of a deal to put a Windows based computer on the internet. Alot of people are afraid now to even connect to the internet because of all the viruses, spamware, adware ect.

Its almost comparable to not wanting to go out side because of all sorts of bad stuff the news makes you afraid of. Just buy a bullet proof vest and a nice easy to use pistol and you'll be fine.

 

[Mav451]

PC forums are VERY useful (in fact just as useful as a forum like this one). Every forum will have trolls, but that's a given. Some good forums I'd suggest are [H]ardforums, nForcersHQ (if you are using an nForce-based motherboard), and good old PCPer forums.

In terms of virus/spyware protection? I don't do ANYTHING particularly special. I got the XP SP2 firewall up (not much) and I surf using Firefox. That's it. If you wanna do email, you use Thunderbird.

As much as these forums may make it seem like maintaining a PC cumbersome task, it is quite the opposite as you can see. I don't do anything special, and I have avoided viruses/spyware without any extra work at all.

 

[atari1356]

And of course, the obvious bit of advice:

Don't open any attachments from your email (well, at least not any that end in .exe, .pif, .scr and probably a few others).

 

[whyrichard]

thanks people!

another quick question..

how easy is it to have the pc (which has not arrived yet) with an 802.11g card installed, and my ibook with airport share files with each other wirelessly?



r.

 

[andysmith]

Very easy - just run the network wizard in XP, and set up some 'shares', go into Network on the iBook, select the PC's name, and just hit enter on the login prompt - then you'll be able to mount one of the shares (you might want to turn on 'Windows Sharing' from System Preferences > Sharing on the Mac, so you can access files from Windows)

As for connecting to the net - first of all, make sure it's got Service Pack 2 on it - go to Start, right click on My Computer, and select Properties - and it should say what service pack it's running.
If it has SP2, it has a firewall built-in. Install this to stop any spyware, and you'll be safe to connect the net.