Why Macs Get Less Viruses Than PCs

I have owned many PCs in the past and have fortunately not had any major viruses, but I have had viruses. I have used virus protection software like Norton, Mcafee, AVG and Windows Defender. Now, on my iMac running Mac OS Snow Leopard 10.6.1 I don’t have any virus protection software installed at this current time. It has been said that Macs do not get viruses, which of course isn’t true. Macs get viruses. PCs get viruses. So how do you back up the statement that Macs don’t get viruses? By saying this, Macs get viruses, but not as many as PCs. Yes, we can just say that and let it be set in stone, but there is a reason why Macs get less viruses than PCs. First off, PCs are 90% prone to viruses, because most hacks, viruses and whatnot are coded and developed only for Windows OS running computers. Secondly, viruses can get through even with some viruses blocking software. Macs have their own software to prevent viruses built-in to the firmware and OS. Windows is more easy to get viruses, because it is more likely to have a virus on the PC without the owner knowing. There isn’t a computer or OS that is “virus proof”, but Mac OS 10 is very hard to be hacked into. Windows is also able to be hacked and turned into a Mac via a process called “Hacint0sh”. On a Mac, there isn’t a need to hack Windows on it, because of Apple’s Bootcamp software and third party software like VMware Fusion and Parallels. This post in no way is targeted to be hate for PC or Mac or Linux. It is simply just my thoughts and opinions on why it is more likely to get a virus on a PC than a Mac. And if the Mac were more popular among business and schools as the main computer, they would be almost as prone to viruses. Thanks for reading.

Power Mac G4 Upgrade Part One.

Hey Guys! This is my first post on thecreativeone.tv and I really hope that you enjoy reading my blog posts!

Recently I bought a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver, with 733Mhz G4 processor, 256mb RAM, No hard drive and the the crumby 32mb standard graphics card. From the moment i got the machine I was impressed with the design of the machine and even by today's standards compared to some PC's you see around today, the Power Mac is still a beautiful machine.

I really wanted to upgrade the machine to bring it back to date, to hopefully run some programs that i run on my Mac Pro and run as a media center and such.

To upgrade my Power Mac i bought a 120gb western digital hard drive, 1gb RAM from Crucial Ram and PCI usb hub. 

The parts went in the machine nicely and after a few hours work i was running 10.4.11 on the Power Mac and it was running pretty quick for today. But i had a few more problems, the machine was very loud, and the graphics card couldn't keep up when running YouTube videos etc, which is expected. Two things that would really bug me.

I went down to PC World (The name is really ironic to say i was going to be putting the parts in a Mac) and i bought three new silent fans, one that would replace the fan cooling the CPU, another to replace the big 120mm fan that was cooling the majority of the computer, and the last one that was blowing air out of the power supply unit.

I have on phrase to say, Mac's do not like to be ripped to pieces. It was a nightmare trying to get all of the fans out of the mac, and then replacing them with all new ones, but after a few hours and several scuffed knuckles, I had replaced every fan inside the Power Mac. 

All the pain was definitely worth it though as when the Power mac was all back together it was considerably quieter than it previously was. Next up was the graphics card.

Now for financial reasons, the cheapest way for me to upgrade the Power Mac's graphics card, was to buy a PC Graphics card and flash it for use with a Mac, easier said than done. The graphics card came, we popped it into an old PC i had laying around and booted up Windows XP.

We created an MS DOS CD, which is considerably hard to make than creating an MS DOS floppy disc and booted into MS DOS, to find out, to flash the graphics card we needed to use a floppy disc, which naturally, because floppy discs are nearly as old as me, I don't have a floppy disc drive or any floppy discs, so it was time to scavenge around.

Now luckily because a friend of mine, has old computers for testing and upgrading, he could find me an old floppy disc drive we could pop into the PC we was using to flash the graphics card, again because he'd never had a need for floppy discs, he didn't have any.

So more work had to be done, I had to go onto trusty eBay and buy some floppy discs, something I thought i'd never do, this morning, a packet of floppy discs landed on my door mat. Stay tuned for an update, and I hope you will enjoy my blog posts in time to come!

Sam

www.twitter.com/spamup94

www.youtube.com/spamup94

Online Names

Do you have an online name you always use? Or do you have different usernames for each website. My user name for anything is thundermonty. David Di Franco is thecreativeone and Chris Pirillo is Lockergnome. There are advantages of having the same online name. Lets say someone likes your youtube videos. They'd take your username and search it in Twitter or Friendfeed. If you use the same username people can find you better. Search Google for thundermonty and you'll find me. They are fun to have and sound good. So remember to have a online name that is easy to type and easy for anyone to remember.

Safari Beta 4 Available

Earlier today, Apple released Safari Beta 4 for both Mac and PC, which you can download here.

A summary of the new features include: (Summary by MacRumors)

-Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a stunning wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;

-Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they've seen before;

-Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes;
-Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;
-Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;
-Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;
-Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site's layout and text;
-Developer Tools- built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and
-Windows-native lookin Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.

The most interesting to me is the new "Top sites" page that will display a number of your top visited websites in a dashboard like manner.