Mac Malware

Most of us knew this day would come.  Mac users have been burying their heads in the sand for far too long now and they have a rude awakening ahead of them as now that Mac's have a 10% share of the American market it's worthwhile criminals writing Malware and that's exactly what they've done!

The Mac Defender fake antivirus virus program can automatically be installed from an infected/dodgy website on to a Mac if you are using the Safari web browser if the Open "safe" files option is enabled.

Apple sent a memo to their technical staff that said "AppleCare does not provide support for removal of the Malware. You should not confirm or deny whether the customer's Mac is infected or not".

Basically they're saying it's your fault you got Malware so you sort it out - we didn't put it there so we're not helping you!

They're assuming that the Malware has prompted the user to enter their Administrator password and that if you've entered the password then you have effectively agreed to have the Malware on your Mac, but many users that have been infected have denied that this is the case.

Apple need to get their act together very quickly else they'll have a major problem on their hands - remember, the bigger the are, the harder they fall so if Macs end up having the same Malware/Adware/Virus issues as normal computers (PC's) then why bother buying a Mac?

Apple Mac & PC Differences

So, What Is The Difference Between A PC & A Mac Then?

After using OS X on my MacBook for over a week now I have noticed that it is significantly faster than a similar spec’d Windows laptop.

My MacBook is also a lot quieter than any PC laptop I have ever used.  I assumed that this was due to the hardware, but after playing around with Boot Camp (this allows you to dual boot your Mac computer with Windows), I noticed that my laptop became noisy when Windows XP was installed.

Windows always seems to be up to something so you constantly hear either the CPU fan spinning up and down or the hard disk drive ticking away.  I have Windows Vista Ultimate Edition on my Dell desktop computer and one of the first things I did was to turn the indexing off, as the constant clicking of the hard disk drive was so annoying.  I foolishly thought this was due to the hardware, but my experience with my new Mac has taught me that this is not necessarily the case.

So why is XP/Vista so noisy? God knows, you could argue that it’s because it’s indexing everything on the hard drive to make finding things quicker – Mac OS X does this and I’ve never heard such a quiet laptop for a long while!

The out-of-the-box experience is better than most Windows based computers as pretty much everything I could ever need was there waiting for me to start using it!   I can play DVD’s, edit/create movies and even organize my photos using a fantastic application called iPhoto (what a great piece of software) and even automatically backup my whole computer using Time Machine without spending another penny.

The only software I did purchase was Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and the only reason I did this is because whether we like it or not, Microsoft Office is the most likely office suite to find installed on a computer in the business world and it’s this world that I work in.

The time it takes to power up my MacBook and let the Operating System finish loading is about the same time as the PC laptops I am used the using.

However, once OS X has loaded you can start using it.  On a Windows computer you can’t as it has to load things like anti-spyware and anti-virus as well as umpteen different programs that sit on the taskbar and it’s these programs that mean you have to wait longer on a PC to start using it than on a Mac.

Even copying data to and from a USB hard drive seems quicker on a Mac!  OS X just seems to use the hardware better than Operating Systems like Windows XP and Vista (although I must say Vista is quicker at this than XP is).

So in a nutshell, I have to say that there is a significant difference between Windows and that of the Mac OS – without a doubt in my mind, the Mac OS is far, far better and with the new updated ‘Snow Leopard’ version of OS X promising even faster performance on a Mac, I can’t wait for the disk to land on my doormat!