What are these viruses and adware you speak of? I've never had one.
Actually I lie. I set-up a win2000 server box at home a few years ago. Within 24hrs I had multiple viruses, adware and had been hacked into. So I sold the machine and bought another mac for at home. Life is good now.
It seems a lot of people have always thought that Macs are somehow "immune" to viruses, it's not true. They are a
computer and can get a virus just like a
Windows or Linux machine can get a virus or malware. The difference is that not many people write viruses which affect Mac systems (which is drastically changing actually.) But Macs are far from invincible to virus attacks. Heck, one of our programming projects back in high school was to design a bug that could attack both
Windows and Mac systems. All in all, it was a very simple bug that didn't damage data or return your passwords or anything, but it would replace links of certain icons to other programs (instead of opening the CD-Rom drive when you clicked on the icon, it instead shut off the
computer, etc.) and associating certain menu commands or events with certain sound effects.
The good ol' days of people buying a Mac because of the limited number of viruses that are targeted towards them is quickly changing. There have been several articles and reports released resently of some very powerful and dangerous viruses beginning to circulate throughout the Mac community and several experts are predicting it will be getting a lot worse very fast due to the number of people who have been picking up OSX.