[muglo] Re: Norton!

On 5/16/05, William R McGrath <wmcgrath@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I have Norton on my machine and I think I should keep it there but you fo=
lks
> seem to abhor it. Why?
>=20
> I know most viruses (virii ?) are created in the windows world but some g=
et
> into the Mac world don't they? Come to think of it, the last one was abou=
t
> four years ago and there was one during the Mac II era but I had a messag=
e
> recently.

Viruses. Virus (referring to an infective particle or program) is not
a Latin word (which is the rule of thumb to use when determining a
plural of a Latinish word).

Virii would be the plural of viri which doesn't exist and viri,
although theoretically the plural of virus, is in fact the plural of
vir (man in Latin).

> Should I free up some space and get rid of it?

It depends, is it causing you problems?

The "Norton Utilities" suite can be useful in some circumstances
(recovery of disk, fixing odd problems).

Any antivirus product is a waste of space for a Mac user. As mentioned
in this thread, NO viruses are known to exist for Mac OS X, and the
few that exist for OS 8 are so far and few between that it's not worth
running the app (& Apple was smart and "broke" a number of the older
viruses with OS 9 ;-).

The problem with antivirus apps is that they destablise your computer
-- they add an extra layer of complexity to the system that can
respond in unpredictable ways.

As for Windows viruses -- they don't affect Macs. You may receive them
through your e-mailer but, unless you ACTIVELY forward them on to
Windows users, you will never re-transmit (and, the likelihood of that
happening is low since these virus-laden e-mails tend to be devoid of
info).

If you run Virtual PC with a Windows OS you certainly would want to
run an anti-virus program in the client OS.

Eric.
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