New York Times: Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster

Ms. Wong, a physician at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in South San Francisco, started getting a relentless stream of pop-up ads a year ago on her four-year-old Hewlett-Packard desktop computer. Often her entire screen would turn blue and urge her to "hit any key to continue." Sometimes the computer would freeze altogether.

After putting up with the problem for months, Ms. Wong said she decided last November that rather than fix her PC, she would buy a new one. Succumbing to the seduction of all the new bells and whistles, she spent $3,000 on a new Apple laptop.

She is instituting new rules to keep her home computer virus-free.

"I've modified my behavior. I'm not letting my friends borrow my computer," she said, after speculating that the indiscriminate use of the Internet by her and her friends had led to the infection problems.

Ms. Wong is apparently unaware that none of the spyware and adware can infect her new Mac, so the quarantine is completely unnecessary. Of course, if I spent $3K on a new Apple laptop, I probably wouldn't let anyone borrow it either.

This story is sad, though, because most of the folks aren't like Ms. Wong, they're just replacing one $500 Windows PC for another. That can't be great for the environment.