I have always been led to believe that the Apple Mac OSX operating system was immune from attack by virus. That’s one of the reasons why I own one, no malware. Works for me.

Except if you have Microsoft software installed on the Mac. The Office Suite is susceptible to Windows virus.

That’s right, A Mac can catch Windows virus via the Word program. I just had to de-infect a Mac that had a nasty dose of the W97M.Thus.A macro virus that infected all the Word documents on the machine.

I ran ClamXav and it located all the infected files; then I was able to move them to a USB flash drive. The machine is now clean but I have a USB drive full of infected files. The solution to getting these fixed is to open each one on a Mac that does not have Word installed, copy the contents into a text editor, save the file then put it back on the original machine and copy the contents back into Word. Tedious but it should be OK.

So if you have the Microsoft Office Suite installed on a Mac be careful, you may be distributing a Windows virus. This infection was spotted because GMail blocked my clients emails when he attached Word documents.

Microsoft keeps emailing me to try to persuade me to pay my subscription to their Partner Program. They point out the many benefits, including the offer of a discounted Windows 7.

I have decided to decline; for the first time since 1995 I am not going to get the latest version of their operating system.

That’s it for Windows products. I will continue to support existing clients with XP and VISTA, but any new clients who have Windows 7 I will decline.

Apple Mac users will, of course, be very welcome and I support all versions of the OS from 9 through to 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Mostly it was fun Microsoft, but quite a lot was dreadful.