For the OP. A mechanical ticking sound coming from your hard disk, is quite often your hard disk's way of telling you, it's about to wear out. Like the cam belt in your car (if you have one) it's much easier to replace a disk before it wears out, than to wait for it to break.
cr0sh:
Actually, unless by some miracle everyone switches over the *nix - something I've been waiting for since I switched in 1995 - it's almost certainly a guarantee that you won't have virus issues if you move to *nix.
Simply because virus authors write viruses (and other malware) for the platforms which have popularity - which currently are Windows, and to a lesser extent, Mac OSX.
Yes and no. *Nix, including OSX, have their holes to be exploited but are fundamentally more secure than Windows, at the process level. Windows has attracted malware writers, partly because it is so very, very easy to compromise. If the whole World switched to *Nix, including OSX, there would be more malware on those platforms but on the whole, far less than is in the wild on Windows today.
Windows NT started out secure, being squarely a development of VMS. At NT4, MS started moving user land processes into the Kernel, to increase performance. The big compromises occurred when IE was introduced and later, when elements of the insecure Win9X code base were merged in, to create XP.
After the Internet exploded into domestic homes, lacking trained sysadmins to secure the network border, it created a perfect storm for making money out of malware. The criminal community quickly caught on to the fact, luring naive Windows users into clicking the wrong button or link, would almost certainly leave the code they injected, with full admin privs. Microsoft attempted to plug the gap at Vista but by that time, there were so many Windows applications installed and needing full admin privs to function, they back tracked with the UAC workaround.
The malware porridge found on a typical Windows system, is largely the result of dubious MS design decisions, made during the development of Windows. In many cases, possibly even most, the majority of a Windows PC's runtime and resource, can now be occupied by malware scanning. Vendors like Norton and McAfee are partly responsible too. The vendors all start out with good intentions but when they make enough money to attract investment corporations, engineering takes a back seat to marketing. The products sold retail to home users, have developed into 'added value,' all encompassing 'security suites.' In the course of hooking the OS, to disable the native protections the paid for product is duplicating, resources get gobbled up and other applications interfered with.
A wonderful example just before Christmas, I got called out to look at a Windows 8 laptop, which was shutting down, unexpectedly. Turns out, the trial version of Norton it had shipped with, had expired. The user (a man in his 80s) clicked through the warning, as his son had told him to do with the other security warnings Windows throws up. When there was so much malware it noticeably slowed up the PC, his son came around, renewed Norton, which then tried to update but took so long, due to the malware hogging the CPU and Internet bandwidth, it kept overheating and shutting down.
I much prefer to avoid the rather awful security suites, in favour of a separate, unassuming, less resource intensive, virus scanner. MS Security Essentials seems to be as good a virus scanner as any and totally free.
You also need a PuP (potentially unwanted program) scanner, to guard against malware which the lawyers claim is not malware; because you accepted their Ts&Cs when you neglected to uncheck the box, hidden in a wall of text, during the install of some unrelated, apparently free software, like Java for instance. Spybot S&D or Malware bytes are both free. Spybot has been getting too big for it's boots recently but just running the browser immunization from time to time, is well worth it.
The firewall which ships with Windows is good enough, particularly in combination with a NAT router connecting to the internet.
Apart from that. The best malware protection is totally free and found between your ears.
Personally. I spend most of my own time using OSX. Essentially *Nix, with the support and user friendly face Linux is missing.
