Ya know, I'm not one of those smug, uber-chic my-mac's-better-than-your-windows-machine kind of people. I've used a lot of OS's and hardware over the years; windows from 3.1 to Vista, OS/2, DOS, Linux, OS9, etc. etc. back to the 8-bit days. The world runs mostly on Windows desktops and I interact with them on a daily basis. And I know no system is completely immune from viruses and other malware.

But after the last two days I understand why I switched and stayed with Apple for the last two years.

As I've mentioned in other journals, I'm not an IT guy, but am apparently more knowledgeable than my co-workers when it comes to PCs. The jail network went down yet again over the weekend and the dispatchers started complaining about popups on the machine they use to connect to NCIC (National Crime Information Computer). Crap. Yup, that machine was infected with a rootkit and was hammering the switch with network traffic. After removing it from the network, the firewall stayed up (knock on wood). Couldn't remove the rootkit after trying all day Monday, so today wiped out the machine and started the long, laborious process of re-installing XP Pro and all the service packs, setting up the network, installing the virus protection it DIDN'T have before, reinstalling the NCIC terminal software and Oracle database, etc. etc. all without the benefit of the original installation disks because they vanished with the old administration. And what started all this?

A dispatcher who insisted on visiting myspace from that machine during her shift. Kee-rist. So now I need to lock down that machine as much as possible and figure out how to enable the traffic logging on the firewall...

Anyone want an IT job?