[STAT]

My girlfriend uses a 15" TiBook and shares a wireless cable modem network with her roommate who is a paranoid PC user. Her roommate seems to think that the problems that her computer is experiencing are a result of my girlfriend's Mac, which is certainly not the case. My GF's Mac experiences none of these problems (welcome to using a Mac!), but doesn't know what to say to her roommate. Her roommate's computer is connected directly to the router via an Ethernet cable (eventhough it's a wireless router), as is my GF's computer.

Additionally, her roommate thinks that my GF's Mac (and my Mac when I'm at her place using her network) are opening her machine up to virus vulnerability, apparently not understanding that Macs don't give Windows machines viruses.

Can y'all give me some information or pointers of things for her to say to her roommate when she starts pitching a fit about how awful Macs are and how Macs are "screwing up her network"?

Thanks so much!!!

[Forte]

Hmmn... Not so sure about what to say, but how about unplugging the Mac to prove that the problems still go on regardless? (That is, assuming the problems on the Windows machine are continually recurring in some form.)

[pipflypip]

As your president say: with some people you don't reason.
Just tell her "stop beeing silly", and go on using the network.

[DarwinX]

Unplug the roomates PC from the network?

A.) She'll still have problems.
B.) The problem's will go away because whatever is running on the machine, most likely spyware and the like is looking for the Internet and it can't find it.
C.)It's Windows, HELLO PC using roomate ....it's not going to be affected by the Mac.

I am currently running the exact setup as described. My roomate has his PC directly connected to the router, and I use the wireless with my PB 12". No problems here nor any other setup I have used/worked with/or supported using said setup.

As far as delivery....be nice and informal...offer to clean it up?(depends on how comfortable you are with PC's I guess). I would suggest Ad-aware SE, Spybot Search and Destroy, Webroot's Spysweeper(while not free you can run it initially to remove spyware) and also run McAfee's Stinger tool. Go to www.download.com or Google to find any of the above listed. Best of luck!

Jeeesh....after reading that it's quite clear why I have a Mac at the end of the day, you have to after supporting Windows all day!

Good luck

[ghporter]

I run a mixed wired/wireless, Mac/PC network. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY for "something bad" to happen to a PC because it's on the same network as a Mac. It is incredibly easy to pick up spyware, though, and it WILL do bad things to the PC.

Tell roomie to look for "Spybot-Search and Destroy," a free product that is extremely good at finding the crap that slimeballs hide in nice people's computers. Then she needs to get "AdAware," also with a free version. This is a backup for the few things that Spybot won't find or completely remove.

Finally, she needs to understand that there are hundreds of thousands of malware items that attack PCs, but only a handful that do anything to Macs, and except for stuff that affects Microsoft Office, there's darn little (maybe nothing) that can "cross infect" from one to the other.