Call It A Successful Test

When I bought Epril's little laptop computer last March, it was filled with pirated software from the computer store. (Whaddya want? It's The Philippines.) The unlicensed anti-virus software cancelled itself after a couple of weeks. I figured, "Let's go without anti-virus software and see just how bad it gets."

Epril only uses her computer for web surfing and playing the little collection of pirated puzzle and board games that were installed. All of her e-mails go through Yahoo, and she doesn't export anything except photos to her Friendster account, so I figured whatever viruses she managed to get, she was totally quarantined based on her computing habits. By doing this, I figured that I'd be in a "format c:" situation sooner or later... and then would just get a licensed version of Windows installed. But, surprisingly, Epril's computer has chugged along without a single hiccup... even as she downloaded and installed enough free gizmos and plug-ins from God-knows-where to give any computer junkie an aneurysm.

(My work computer is connected to the same home network, but is probably the most hack-proof non-military computer out there, due to my company's very strict protections and limitations: The number of file types that can be written to the hard drive without administrator privileges is limited to a number that can be counted on one or two hands (obviously .exe is at the top of the list of excluded file types). You can't even open up a thin-client program in a browser that isn't on the list of programs approved by my company. And of course, this is all backed up by daily-updated, centrally-monitored, turned-up-to-11, Symantic antivirus software.)

So we got our new camera, and before I hooked it up to Epril's computer, I put on some new anti-virus software. After a little over 6 months without virus protection, how many viruses did Epril have on her computer?

53.