ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE FOR MAC?

[Fritz T]

Hello, this topic is not about archicad... Hope its the correct forum.
I'm in the process of migrating from PC to mac, and wonder if anyone out there can give me any pointers as to the potential risk of virus infection on OSX. I'm getting many conflicting opinions, ranging from from "take a deep breath and relax, then carry on working" (posting on the apple site), to something completely the opposite and sounding potentially life-threatening on Symantec's site.
What are the risks? What should one be doing - i.e. what is good practice?
Thank you
PS. I do not use Microsoft software, such as Office.

[Anonymous]

well symantec would say that, wouldn't they

i've never heard of a mac running OSX being compromised

i have heard that some virus checkers for OSX can cause serious problems

at the moment i'd say just run apple 'software update' regularly


bill

[TomWaltz]

We've got 60 people running on OX 10.3 Tiger, with Mozilla mail client & web browser. Half the people here have Apples at home as well.

None of them have virus protection, none of them have had a virus in the two years since we switched.

[Anonymous]

Been using mac's for 20+ years and I've only had one virus from way back in the floppy disk days. (Computer ran only on a floppy... no harddrive!) I made the mistake of installing a shareware file that somebody gave me and it caused a bug. Never used shareware since.

[Fritz T]

Hi
Thanks for all the advice!

[Eduardo Rolon]

And remember that Norton AV is notorious for getting OS X to behave erratically, just check the discussion forums at apple, where most of the time the first question to a problem is: Do you have Norton installed? If so remove it...

[Anonymous]

ejrolon wrote:
And remember that Norton AV is notorious for getting OS X to behave erratically, just check the discussion forums at apple, where most of the time the first question to a problem is: Do you have Norton installed? If so remove it...

It took to me some years to realise that this soft has the particularity to create problems where they don't exist. Since i don't use it, everything is fine!
Be quiet, at 99%, you don't have viruses risk on Mac.
Marketing, maybe, but at the end, very bad strategy and results for this company.

[Mark Wallace]

Do avail yourself of the monthly software upgrades Apple offers. These upgrades include bug fixes as well as security updates. Gee....today is the 26th.....I should be getting an upgrade notice anytime.

Mark

Dual 2.33 GHz G5, 1.5 Mb RAM
OSX.4.1
AC7, PM 2.3 (still)
-----------------------------------------------
Mark R. Wallace AIA
Mark Wallace Architect
P.O. 26537
Collgeville PA 19426

[Dwight]

Me, too.
Virus, what virus???

Had a Microsoft Word Macro virus years ago that virus software would pick up, but was later told that whatever it was just LOOKED like a virus and not to worry, but whenever I get that "do you want to enable this macro (thing that looks like a virus but isn't)" message I say "no" and after a while it stopped asking.

[__archiben]

'virex' is available as a cheap/free and often updated virus checker for the mac. i'd been using it because it came free with a dotmac account i started a little while ago. unfortunately tiger has put paid to that at the moment (there's a conflict), but like all the other mac users here, i've never had a virus in my 13-14 years of using a mac: i had no worries uninstalling it for the time being . . .

~/archiben