Quote Originally Posted by Slartibartfast View Post
If you dont want to buy a mac, i would start from scratch and setup auto update for patches/mcafee, then install firefox w/ noscript.

<rant>
i've got to be honest, i have no idea where people get all these viruses and malware from.

Keeping you machine up to date on patches/dats should be automatic. If you go download some shady software and run it as admin, you are rolling the dice.

I've never had one of my machines have these problems in my 20ish years of using dos,windows,linux.

I've had some seen some servers get infected due to not being patched and assholes bringing infected laptops into the network long long time ago.

</rant>
It just happens. I do get updates autamatically both for XP and McAfee. It just happens: you're on line and suddenly you get pop-ups. In this case I suddenly got a pop-up from what looked like an on line poker game site and some other funny sites. Sites I had never visited. I had been on line for a while with I.E and not Mozilla, maybe that was the problem.