I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how many people know so little about their computers or how they work ...
Basic systems are essentially appliances. For the most part they're all standard components and they all work the same. Although eMachines seem to have a propensity for failing power supplies, which tend to take the processor or motherboard (or both) with them.
Dell often has very reasonable systems, complete with 17" flat panel monitor, for $450 or less with no rebates required.
That's bal>
If you don't run a virus checker, how do you know?
That's not just foolish, it's stupid. There are free AV products out there, some of them very good. I use Avast! on all of my home PC's.
And you don't use IM? Hopefully you at least keep your OS and apps updated with the latest patches. Even Mozilla/Firefox has had it's problems, and some exploits were independent of the browser used.
Even only visiting sites you trust isn't good enough -- there have been several reputable sites responsible for spreading infections because the site serving their banner ads got compromised, and they were serving infected content with the ads.
You know, there's really nothing to relate Internet activity with disk activity. And hard drive performance has almost nothing to do with the performance or capability of a system.
While I agree that they're unnecessary and mostly pointless, the system tray apps don't consume cycles. They do consume memory, however. Removing them helps, but "modern" OSes consume enough that taking that step isn't much by itself. Memory is currently cheap. You can significantly improve performance just by adding memory. I wouldn't even try to run XP with less than 512M of RAM, and generally prefer 1GB.
They don't consume cycles, but they do take memory. Most service processes live in a constant blocked state until they're actually needed.
Go study International Law and politics. Most of the phishing and virus development and operations happens in place like Russia, Romania, Korea China, etc. The Russian mob is very big in funding virus R&D.
If you really care about viruses and spyware, don't use a Windows system. Get a Mac, or a Linux system. Nothing is 100% secure, and there have been reported security issues with Macs, but I can't think of a single published expoit targeting them.
John Meissen snipped-for-privacy@aracnet.com