I think you are lucky then mrodgers -
also would you happen to surf thought a good external modem? Many of them have firewalls installed but they are not often as good as an incomputer wall.
Just the what I assume is a standard POS DSL modem from the provider. I've been on DSL for 2 years.
Previous, I was on 56k dialup. People complained about connection problems to the online game I run that had a far greater broadband connection than even what I currently have, let alone my 56k dialup. Yet, I was able to play online nightly without ever lagging or having connection issues.
It's all about what crap you clog up your system with. MS Office, music players, ITunes, camera software, video software, winzip, just about everything will install something that auto starts and take up your resources. They half load in the background stating that it is so they "load faster" when you want to use it. When in reality, all that clogging crap causes the entire system to bog down.
My mother's computer came with Vista. I looked at it and there were 87 processes running just from her pulling it out of the box and firing it up. 87 PROCESSES! Unfortunately, that was back when Vista was brand new and google didn't give me any results of what they all were yet. So, I didn't know which was actually critical to the computer running and which was useless computer clogging crap.
I think its also important to point out that the reason that apple computers don't have viruses is to say that they do get them, but most pro hackers make windows viruses as they will affect the majority of the computing market (whilst those -insert harsh swear word- who sit at home alone in a dark room and make random viruses for the fun of it are often bored and sitting infront of a windows computer
That is exactly why PCs have the virus trouble and Macs don't. It's because the PC userbase is the majority, thus they target the majority. Since PC users are the majority, PC have the majority of stupid users that download or click everywhere without understanding what they are doing, thus bringing on the virus/adware crap all on their own.
Bought my first computer in 1996 with Windows 95. I've had 6 computers all together in 12 years, Win 95, 98, 98SE, and XP. I've never had a virus and never had a problem in 12 years. Folks running P4 3 ghz computers have trouble with framerates in the game I play. My daughter plays the same game (it's a racing simulator) with acceptable framerates on an old Celeron 667 mhz computer with 512 mb ram and 11 mb onboard shared graphics memory. I think it's the PC userbase that's the problem, not the OS that they run.