Another piece of advice is to keep two computers, if you can. An older one that is your dedicated internet computer. One that you don’t mind reformatting and reloading occasionally, when it becomes infected.
Your other computer is the one that you do your real work on that you only connect to the net occasionally, to upgrade or to transfer files, but you don’t do any serious amount of surfing with it.
The only problem here is that I'll need some more desk space, since they use separate docking stations that aren't compatible.
Good advice.
I actually have three computers at my desk because I like to play with operating systems.
I have a suggestion that is much less expensive than buying a MAC: LinuxMint. Very easy to install and use. And best of all, its free!
Good advice. For my business side stuff I have a Windows laptop that I never connect to the Inet (not live, anyway - I download stuff to my main box and then wire it to the laptop), and for all the rest I have an older tower running Linux Fedora 10 using Firefox as the browser. Linux has proven itself over the many years to be robust and virus free.