Today is a good day to use a mac.

Today my university computer network was crippled by the latest windows virus. This virus causes infected machines to reboot every 45 seconds and spreads itself to every vulnerable machine on the local network. Several labs were rendered completely useless with EVERY machine infected.

One of these labs used a program called DeepFreeze which is supposed to restore the system to a saved state on every reboot. Somehow, that image became infected as well meaning every time the machines rebooted they reinfected themselves.

Several departments moved all essential files and functions to macs in order to maintain basic functions.

At one point this afternoon the windows department boss went through the office calling for all personnel who were performing non-essential tasks to report to him for virus cleaning duty.

Not a single mac had a problem of any sort today.

Other facts/statistics:

Macs make up 1/3 the total number of computers on campus.

There is one full time mac person in the IT department. He services all the macs and runs 8 macintosh servers with the help of two part time student workers.

There are 11 windows qualified personnel who handle everything else. There are also a half dozen or so student workers who assist them.

That's a ratio of 11 to one. Adjusted for the proportion of macs to pcs on campus that's still a 550% difference.

And that, right there, is where the low cost of running macs comes into play. The initial machine purchase cost is higher. But the support costs are 550% higher.

Longevity also helps bring the cost down. We run most of our computers for 8 years. We have a number of 450 G4s who are still on active duty running 10.3 today. Try to do that with Windows XP/2000 on a 450mhz pentium 2.

Yes, today is a very good day to use a mac.