Welcome to The Hoosier Illuminati. Macintosh bigot, clothes horse, motorsports fanatic (as long as they turn right), Anglophile.

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance. --Henry Ward Beecher

And this, dear John, is why they make the Macintosh.

John Derbyshire, Nathan‘s avatar at NRO, is having a little spyware problem today.

Well, I’ve been having virus problems—actually “ad-ware,” I think. Shortly after opening up Firefox or Internet Explorer, ads for cheap air fares, porn sites, and (unkindest cut of all) anti-virus software would keep popping up.

I updated my security suite and ran all the programs. I jiggled security settings on my browsers to max. I tried a couple other things I found on the web. Problem diminished, but not by much.

Wanting to get on with some work, and not at the moment inclined to spend $150 plus two hours on the phone with an online clean-up service, it occurred to me to just try a browser I haven’t used before. So I downloaded Chrome, Google’s own browser.

That worked fine. Short learning curve, no more unwanted pop-ups. But … no Google toolbar! I have to re-create all my darn bookmarks; and they’re stuck here on my PC, so if I use Chrome on another one, I’ll have to re-re-create them. (Though since the ad-ware virus is presumably on my machine, I guess I can revert to IE or Firefox elsewhere.)

Well John, first, stay away from the porn sites.  Second, surely someone has told you to buy a Mac by now, but if they haven’t… buy a Mac.  Yes, I can hear your teeth gnash from here, but do you want to get your work done or do you want to futz about with crap like this?  And I can hear Nathan screaming at his screen that he uses Windows and doesn’t have these problems, and I also regrettably use Windows on occasion and don’t have those problems either, but we’re IT guys.  Derb is just a guy who has to use a computer and doesn’t have time to dick around trying to figure out how to keep the crud at bay. 

Derb, seriously.  Get a Mac.  Your life will be better for it.  And I’ll bet Derb writes a post complaining about all the people who tell him the exact same thing by 3:00.

EDIT:  I was almost right. 3:18.