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["國產 Wei-Yee Chan (Made in Chinar)"]

Windows or no windows, any local administrator has the potential to do
damage to his/her system.  If your using a Mac, and a virus attempts to
change your system settings, the administrator password would be
required.  It doesn't matter whether it's a single or multiple user PC,
and whether the PC is joined to a domain or not. 

My reasoning is that if your logged on as a local administrator all the
time, as would be required for most Windows machines in order to have
programs  run properly, U wouldn't know when a virus hits U, unless your
anti-virus program is capable of detecting it.  On the other hand, if
your using a Mac or a Linux OS, then chances are that your OS would
prompt U for the password whenever a program or virus attempts to make
changes to the system settings, thereby alerting U to the possibility of
a virus being present.  Without the deliberate action of keying in the
administrator password, the virus wouldn't be able to propagate itself.

As a Windows sysadmin and a Linux user, I personally think that it's
mainly a matter of OS design that sets Windows and OSX / Linux apart, as
far as this virus matter is concerned.  This, of course, is just my
opinion based on my personal experiences.

If your talking about unauthorised access to your system, then a simple
password change for all accounts on that PC would suffice, provided that
your system is still "intact", meaning that it hasn't been compromised
by trojans, keyloggers and viruses....etc.

David Aikema wrote:

>Why would you have to logged in as administrator to be infected?  The
>damage the virus could do might be confined to the areas of the system
>to which the user had write access, but a large number of PCs are
>basically single-user machines in any case.
>
>If access to my account were to be compromised, I'd probably reinstall
>the OS anyways, so to me this isn't all that much different.
>
>David
>
>  
>
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