Whilst I favour OS X-powered Macintoshes, I still have a PC. It comes in handy for computer games, occastional software development, and keeping doors open.

It used to be such a reliable machine, way back in 1997, when I bought it. My problem was that (as chronicled here) upgrading the motherboard and processor turned it into a nightmarishly unreliable piece of crap. Putting Windows XP (which stands for Extremely Painful) didn't exactly help matters either.

Just recently, despite minimal use, it got a virus. As a regular Mac user, viruses are something that happen to other people (namely Windows users), so you can imagine just how prepared I was to deal with it.

Several hours later, and my PC is disinfected. Great, so back to trouble-free operation, right? No. No, because whilst I may have removed the multiple viruses and trojan horses infecting the system, I hadn't removed the "Adware".

For those who don't know, adware is pretty much the same thing as a virus, except it just takes over some of the functionality of your (Microsoft) web browser, changing things like the home page, the default search page, the colour of your browser's underwear, and so on, to point to advertisements for online casinos, porn sites, or Dick Cheney's Yahoo briefcase.

So now, I'm running - daily - virus scanning and adware scanning software. Two software packages to buy, and run, constantly, and update, constantly, just to keep the basic operating system running. Yes folks, it's the magic that is... Microsoft Windows.

I'll just keep using my OS-X powered Macintoshes. One more tool I need, to really sort out my Windows machine...a new bit of hardware...a shiny new sledgehammer.