Yawn.
Same Windows-bashing, different day.
1. Install anti-virus. There are good free ones available.
2. Windows comes with Defender, a decent anti-spyware app.
3. Use the hardware firewall in your WAP or router.
4. Windows firewall is already activated on install.
What Windows is vulnerable to in a magazine's lab is utterly irrelevant. Windows 7 is a very good O/S, and a HUGE improvement to Vista.
Here are the infection rates per 1000 executions of the MSRT for the most recent versions of Windows, prior to 7. There is NO question that MS has made huge improvements on this front.
Same Windows-bashing, different day. Yes. Very sad. Perhaps one day Microsoft will fix their products so they don't take such a bashing.
1. Install anti-virus. There are good free ones available.
I'm sure there are some wonderful ones available. One must still question why this is necessary.
2. Windows comes with Defender, a decent anti-spyware app.
Yes, quite decent. Too bad it's still necessary.
3. Use the hardware firewall in your WAP or router.
Yes, if you have one. Else you have to spend money to protect Microsoft's defective products.
4. Windows firewall is already activated on install.
And is still vulnerable to 8 out of 10 randomly selected malware packages.
There is NO question that MS has made huge improvements on this front.
Yes, just like hitting yourself in the head with a 5 lb. hammer is a huge improvement to hitting yourself in the head with a 10 lb. hammer.
But frankly, without the raw data used to create that graph it's rather useless. Except for one fact...
Every single product listed there show some rate of infection by malware. And every single one is a Microsoft product. If Microsoft had data that showed that any other OS had a similar or worse infection rate than any Windows product it would be on that list and highlighted in a big, bold font.
But all that's there is Windows.
And that's pretty much the way it is. Malware, zombied systems, botnets, pretty much every major type of pwnage of systems is almost entirely a Microsoft Windows problem.
No other operating systems have this much of a problem. At last count there were a few pieces of malware for OSX in the wild, all of them trojans that require the user to actually bypass security and install the software. The same for Linux. None for Solaris. None for FreeBSD. None for OpenBSD. None for NetBSD.
And to pre-empt the debunked fantasy that Windows only gets pwned so much because it's more popular, note that Linux/Apache is by far the most common web server platform on the Internet. And it has an infection rate much, much lower than Windows/IIS.
It's possible to build an OS that isn't a petri dish for malware. Maybe one day, Microsoft will do it.
But considering that they've been saying that they're going to clean up their act for 10 years and still haven't, I'm not holding my breath.