You've got sludge

The feature story on Salon today, makes me feel like they have been reading my mind. As I face reformatting the hard drive for the fourth time due to my recent overwhelming bout of worms and spyware, I just want to throw in the towel. I'm probably off to the store today for either new hard drive or should I just go ahead and switch back.

As one guy from Symantic puts it

"They've tried many different things and it doesn't help. They'll end up reinstalling or cleaning it out or buying a new one -- a lot of this stuff is just so deeply embedded, it becomes more and more difficult to get rid of the gunk, the sludge at the bottom of your machine."

The only thing that's stopping me is the fact that I need to see as a user does. And I know from analyzing web logs for my clients, Mac users in Washington State (as least using our web sites) amout for about .5-1%. And I'm pretty sure, from the looks of Victrola and Bauhaus, most of those are in my neighborhood. So what do I do? Also switching would require me to repurchase all the software I just bought I year ago, and some of those applications aren't available for the Mac anyway (I'm looking at you Visio). But then again, there is Virtual PC right?

I guess I need to do more research and resintall that fourth and final time. But I'm just about at the end of my PC rope.