Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster

This is logical. Don't try to fix anything. Give up. Spend more than necessary to put a bandaid over the problem.

Hmm......sounds like I've heard about someone else putting bandaids on things rather than fixing them. This method of "repair" seems to be catching on.

Cheaper. I see. So if he gets infected in the 12-20 minutes that the average machine lasts on the internet before infection, it's faster and cheaper to fork over another 400 clams.

This could be a very expensive habit! No wonder a certain monopoly has hardware vendors in their pocket.

I suspect they mean active viruses and malware, not the total. I don't believe we've doubled viruses to more than 200,000 yet. Not for another month or two at least. Or did I miss something?

Make the kiddies stop using it then. They're probably the primary reason for it being there in quanbreasty, though it's nearly impossible for practically anyone to not get hit by this crap. (Yes, I can hear the caterwauling of the DooFu$es and the privatesbells and the Ewiks and the whole slew of folks who will butture us, quite vehemently, that they've never been infected in the umpteen decades they've been using the junk. Excuse me if I don't believe a syllable of it, m'kay?)

They don't have to do all of that work. All they have to do is move away from the main source of the problem.

The problem may be a shared one in small ways among a lot of software vendors. But there's only really one that leaves itself wide open and invites this stuff to happen. Other vendors can't do anything about it at all except in perhaps some small ways. The entire remainder of the manufacturers combined share less of the blame than a single vendor.

Yeah. "There was a market that someone else was making money on. To fix that problem we have to put everybody that's currently in that market out of business. The only way to do that is to suck it in and jump into the fray.

"It's not a pretty job, but somebody's gotta do it."

How could he tell? Oh, that's right, he can't. So he made it up.

OK. But about 600 million of those times were probably due to running it on the same malware that it didn't remove the first try (or the second, or the third, or....).

The people who *have* been using it shouldn't start feeling smug. They aren't being protected either, as we witnessed less than a week ago where a spyware company's products were removed from the dangerous list because a monopolistic, criminal enterprise was interested in buying the spyware company. If that can happen, how much does it cost another spyware company to just have their "products" removed from the list?

If it has Redmondware on it (does someone have doubts?), it's being used for much better purposes now anyway. At least it's less of a danger.

She pretty much already took care of the problem.

Not quite. It was the indiscriminate use of what was on it that created the problem. Different underlying software has been acquired. Problem solved.

He has a choice. He just needs a smidgen of education.

It took 15 hours to figure that out? The world is in a hopeless state!

Bully for him! Too bad it's hopeless. All he did was to shove a stick into the hole in the dyke. Now he only needs several hundred thousand sticks to shove in the other holes, plus a healthy dose of luck that they all hold. They rarely do.

See? I knew the Redmand(tm) Atbreastude(tm) was spreading.

Many of the moronic trolls (that would be nearly all of them) make the claim that linux is free, but it can't be given away. Most of we with opposing opinion claim the problem is one of education and availability, and that people can't magically see a solution that they've never heard of before, that they don't know anything about, that they wouldn't have the slightest idea where to begin getting it and that they wouldn't know how to go about installing it. The above shows, clearly, which side of that argument is correct.

Time to go out and do some more educating.....

I don't see the NYT *advocating* this as a solution so much as explaining how some people are coping. Hopefully they'll do a followup that describes how others are coping by getting rid of the source of the problem instead of wasting money on new machines that will be in the same state in a few weeks-months. That's the missing element in the story. One mention is made about someone changing to Apple, but there's nothing about what she should have gained from that move. Maybe because the article's authors aren't any smarter about these things than the people tossing their boxen.

-- Windows doesn't have any bugs. It just develops random features.