The article also includes a mini-essay by Henry Norr, a well known Mac guru -- on Windows antiviral solutions. I'm no fan of NAV, so I'm interested ...
... . After trying all the major commercial anti-virus products for XP - most recently TrendMicro's - I have for the last six months or so been running something called AVG Free Edition from GrisoftI left out the parts where Norr blames Windows users for not sufficiently securing their systems -- while denying he's doing so. Sometimes smart people can be pretty dumb.
http://www.grisoft.com/doc/289/lng/us/tpl/tpl01
I recommend it highly for home users. (According to the terms, "AVG Free Edition is for private, non-commercial, single home computer use only. Use of AVG Free Edition within any organization or for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited.")It's updated every day if necessary, automatically if you configure it that way, and it's very unobtrusive. I have no way of testing the protection it purports to provide, but the reviews put it in the same league as the top commercial products. Complete system scans are slower than with Trend Micro, etc., but since I have it set to do those in the middle of the night, it doesn't bother me. The free version is limited to one automatic update per day (!), so in theory you could be vulnerable to a new virus appearing between one update and the next, but the odds of catching a new virus on the very day of its release are pretty slim, especially if you practice basic principles of safe computing such as those Bruce outlines...
Another writer mentions that XP rots relatively slowly if it's off the net. I think that's true; I've kept installs working for years. It's annoying that it rots at all, but I do fear that after 2 years of my laptop's install I'll need to schedule three days for a refresh and reinstall. (I have a lot of complex software on this machine, and a lot of complex configuration.)
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