"Jaques d'Altrades" wrote in message
Nuts. I've never updated Win 98 or 2000 since they were bright shiny new
in '98 and 2000 respectively, and I have only had a month's trial of an
AV program in seven years or so on the net.


Here we go again with the "my granny smoked till she was 102 and never got
cancer" argument. If you've never updated them you're sticking your head in
the sand and quite frankly very foolish.

I have received countless virii and worms, trojans etc in e-mail, and
never been infected with one of them.

How the hell would you know!? Especially with trojans, what makes you think
you cold pick it up with a scanner? Maybe some lame known trojan - anyway,
AV software is rubbish at picking up trojans, something like The Cleaner
does far better. BTW, look up the meaning of a worm - they are self
replicating, not spread by email like a virus.


However, the first things to be uninstalled from the above OSs were
Outlurk, Outpuke Depress and IE.


Which is fine, you've got rid of a lot of the low hanging fruit. However
many of the recent vulnerabilities are in Windows components, not the
internet applications. You would never know if someone compromised your
machine (ie. not a script or a worm) and hid their tracks. You make this
extremely easy by not bothering to update your software.



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