D I S A S T E R S

 

 

We all have a computer disaster in our past. For me, it was the Great Head Crash of 1994. It’s something everyone fears, but with a Mac, your data is probably safer than ever. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First of all, Macs are just as prone to disk fragmentation as PCs are, so that’s a non-issue. The frequency of application crashes, however, has been much debated, and I find that PCs running Windows crash much more frequently than a Mac with Mac OS 9.0.4. In fact, there are thousands of "known issues" (or bugs) in Windows, and Microsoft chose to release the software anyway. That’s not to say that Mac OS isn’t buggy, because it is, but far less so than Windows.

Crashes happen to everyone. My own theory on this can be expressed this way:

S I D E B A R ILOVEYOU Virus for the Mac Someone circulated an email recently that read: Congratulations! You now have the ILOVEYOU virus for the Macintosh! This virus works on the honor system. You will have to do the following: 1. Please randomly delete some of the files in your System Folder. 2. Forward this email to other Mac users.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

So, crashes are indeed platform independent. However, Mac OS has been much kinder to me than a Windows computer. The process one goes about fixing the problems is roughly the same (Safe Mode vs. Extensions Off, ScanDisk vs. Disk First Aid, etc.), so that’s not such a big deal.

There is a big deal, however. And that big deal is viruses. There are nearly 47,500 computer viruses in existence, according to the Symantec Anti-Virus Research Center. The vast majority of those are for Windows. Only a hundred or so are for the Mac. This is primarily because Mac OS was created with security in mind, and is very difficult to "break into" as Windows viruses do. However, with the growing popularity of the iMac, Mac viruses are spreading more quickly, and that’s just because more people have a Mac.

For instance, the recent Melissa and ILOVEYOU email virus attacks don’t affect Macs, because theOutlook Express email client can’t run a Windows script using Visual Basic (a Windows programming language).

And another issue of late has been denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. DoS attacks are when a hacker uses your computer as a "jump off point" to break into a server, making look as if you were the person doing it. Macs have always been immune to DoS attacks, because Open Transport (the software that Mac OS uses to regulate traffic in and out of its network interfaces) just doesn’t let traffic into the computer without permission. Plain and simple.

Mac users can rest assured that their data is safe and sound.