rather shocking news

[Ice9]

New research from cable company Telewest** reveals that the average price of curing a computer virus now stands at £260 – significantly more than remedying a common cold. Moreover, a quarter of UK PC owners succumb to “virus rage” and admit to ditching their machine rather than calling someone in to fix it.

This seems quite extreme, ditch your computer when getting infected by a virus!
The cost of the new pc should be added to Micro$haft Vista when they reach their "trustworthy computing" stage, because at that stage the users won't have to care about virii anymore, they will be totally safe ... using Linux

Edit:link to article

[cdhgold]

I work at a school district as a computer tech and also encountered this yesterday a user who admitted they had thrown multiple home computers in the trash due to windoze crashes .. he had both cheap PC and high end ones that got the BSOD and he had somebody reload them and when they got another BSOD he trashed them..

[Void Main]

Heh heh, I wonder if those costs are figured into Microsoft's TCO reports. :)

[worker201]

Might be profitable to fly overseas and go dumpster-diving! You'd be lucky to find a salvageable piece of RAM in the trash in the US.

[Jenda]

lol... the irony. On one end, people throwing machines in the trash. On teh other, people who want the components so bad, they are willing to go through the trash to find them.
Wouldn't the world be a better place if the former... had a brain?

<ot> And since it's not worth starting a new thread for: If any of you ever use freenode IRC, feel free to drop by #help - I'm constantly looking for new helping force, on any topic </ot>

[Calum]

they throw their PC away when they get a virus.

i have met people like this.

it's beyond commenting on, it really is. there's nothing you can do to save somebody from that level of cluelessness

[dickinsd]

A quarter of UK users?

I have never met anyone that would have done this.

I have spent many an hour fixing problems for other people caused by simply not having common sense when browsing - people that click Yes on the pop up windows, or people that download software from Kazaa, or even use Kazaa for that matter. Or people that actually save attachments from people they don't know.

I like Linux, but I use a Windows XP machine almost every day (at home), I have an up-to-date virus scanner and a collection of spyware watching tools - and of course I only use Firefox and Thunderbird.
And when it comes to email; if the mail is not from a known contact, but has somehow slipped through the spam filter, I don't even bother reading it. As such I very rarely get anything for me to be concerned about. (Touch wood)

Off the top of my head I would say that everyone I have spoken to that has had a problem in the last say 4 months has been a problem that is directly related to downloading any old rubbish from p2p services - and unfortunately some of these people have had similar problems before and will have those problems in the future - they just don't think about what they are doing. And even worse is that even when they have had to learn the hard way, they still go back.

But back to the point, if you know anyone that falls into said 'quarter' that lives in Bristol, please forward their details I'll keep an eye on thier garbage - I could keep the good stuff and sell the rest on eBay

Dave