<p>BCEagle, this is exactly why I bought a Mac. The combination of my lack of knowledge to constantly reconfigure things and clean up infected machines along with my absolute lack of patience was too much for me to take. I realize that there are many computer savy people out in the world, but many of us regular people want to be able to just turn on our computer and have it work. </p>
<p>My older son’s Dell Studio’s hard drive failed after 10 months (as well as some other issues). He was extremely hesitant to switch to a Mac because he was so used to using only Windows. After being disgusted with the quality of his relatively new Dell, he broke down and bought a MacBook Pro a couple of weeks ago. Usually, we can hear him upstairs cursing out his laptop. However, since switching over to his new MacBook, all is calm and peaceful . 
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<p>I’m not bashing Window’s based laptops. It’s just that we don’t have the patience, temperament, or computer science knowledge to deal with them anymore.</p>
<p>Pardon me for being un-Mac educated, but why is virus protection, etc. not a concern for Macs?</p>
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Because there are so few Macs (relatively speaking) malware authors tend to ignore it. Why write a virus for 5% of the computers when for the same effort you can write one for 95% of them?</p>
<p>It’s a form of “security through obscurity”, which of course provides no real security at all.</p>
<p>It is a myth that Macs are inherently more secure than pc’s. The Mac has been the first to fall at the last couple of PwnToOwn contests.</p>
<p>I’ve had very few infections on any of my pc’s over the years, because I don’t visit sites that are likely to infect me (porn and warez sites, for example), and I am careful about opening attachments, and I don’t use Internet Explorer.</p>
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<p>Well, if you think that you’re going to get something for nothing illegally, then perhaps you’re going to get burned. In terms of viruses and spyware, the count on Mac is in double digits. On Windows, we’re talking five to six digits.</p>
<p>Even the people that do know how to clean Windows systems don’t really care to do it as it ties up hardware, desk space and time. Avast found a new infection and it disappeared. I don’t know if it cleaned it or if it winked away only to pop up later so I’m running another full Avast scan.</p>
<p>Speaking of Dell, the Attorneys General of several states argued that Dell’s poor performance and poor customer service in recent years was intentional. A web search will reveal many news reports about this and about the settlement that the AGs reached with Dell. I thik the Wall Street Journal covered it most recently last week.</p>
<p>In some ways today’s PC retail business is very similar to the used car dealers tactics.</p>