In any case, there are 11.9 drivers that’ll work on the MBP (running Windows 7 64-bit), and they don’t require crazy hacks or anything. They’re just a pain to find. They’ll show up as the “6600m and 6700m series” once installed as you’ll see in the image below.

They’re on AMD’s site here:
http://www2.ati.com/DRIVERS/mobile/11-9_mobility_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc_ocl.exe

Yes, they look strikingly similar to the mobility drivers you probably already downloaded, but the filename is slightly different (note the “ocl” in the filename), as is the source location. They also appear to be 64-bit only (versus 32/64 in the easier-to-find-but-totally-worthless version).

It installs without much of a hitch (Microsoft Visual C library might not install due to being old, but that was it for me). It’s worth noting that I uninstalled the old drivers first through the AMD/ATI uninstaller. It may not be necessary, but if you run into headaches, it’s worth trying to uninstall the old stuff first.

Credit to twannguyen on the Apple disscusion boards for this one.

The Symptoms:

• The actual boot-up is pretty quick. As soon as you log in, it slows down to a crawl.
• The desktop takes forever to load after boot.
• Programs take forever to start immediately after boot.
• You may hear the hard drive ticking (thrashing) during this slow period.
• It may appear as though the hard drive is swapping during this slow period. You might think the page file is swapping like crazy.
• After 15-20 minutes, everything’s speedy again.

Sound like the problem you’re having?

If the answer to that is “yes”, here’s the next question…. Are you running a Windows bootcamp partition? If the answer to that one’s “yes” too, you’ve just found the cause.

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Actually, it’s not bootcamp’s fault. It’s Apple’s built-in Spotlight search (represented by the little magnifying glass in the top-right corner of your screen). Every time the computer restarts, it tries to rebuilt the entire search index on your Windows BOOTCAMP partition. This takes a really long time, and the rest of your computer slows down while this rebuild takes place.

So how to we fix it? We disable Spotlight’s indexing on the BOOTCAMP drive.

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It’s a bit of a convoluted process, so I’ve tried to make this pretty simple. Here are the steps:

1) Boot into Windows (your bootcamp partition).

2) Run the “Command Prompt” program as an Administrator. Here’s a picture to help:

(1) Click "Start", (2) go to "All Programs / Accessories", (3) RIGHT CLICK on the "Command Prompt" program, and (4) choose "Run as administrator".

3) Now, we have to create an empty file called .metadata_never_index on the C drive, to tell Spotlight not to index/search this Windows drive anymore. Here’s how we do it:

3a) Type cd \ and press enter.

3b) Type type NUL > .metadata_never_index and press enter.

Picture below to help:

The stuff you type is in red. I put little blue arrows to show where you need to leave a space (spacebar).

Make sure you use the proper \ (backslash), the proper > (greater-than sign), and the proper _ (underscore).

4) Without the fancy coloring, here’s what it’ll look like:

This is what it looks like, without color.

5) DONE!

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Now you can close Command Prompt, and restart back into Mac OS X again. You should notice the delay is gone. The desktop will show up quickly, and your programs should be nice and speedy once again.

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Note: While this speeds up your Mac again, note that when you try to search through Spotlight or Finder, it won’t search the BOOTCAMP partition anymore (it’ll only search the contents of your Mac drive). You can still read/access the Windows drive, but you can’t search it. This generally doesn’t matter for most people – usually the only time you want to search for a Windows file is when you’re booted into Windows already anyway (which you can still do), but keep it in mind.

If you ever want to UNDO the change, all you have to do is delete the .metadata_never_index file. You could do it through the command prompt, or possibly through Windows Explorer (you may have to change the settings to un-hide everything for it to show up).

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Finally, for those who are wondering why it’s such a convoluted process to create the .metadata_never_index file, there are a few things at play. First, OS X won’t write to an NTFS partition, which all the latest editions of Windows tend to use. So you can’t create the file without booting into Windows. Second, Windows programs won’t let you create a file that starts with a period, which is why it’s being done through a command prompt. Windows also won’t let you put anything on the root drive unless you’re running as administrator.

There are other ways you could go about doing it, but this is the most concise way I could think of. Anything else involves either something like Macfuse/3G-NTFS (which most people don’t have), or by using notepad to create a file and renaming it (which you’d have to do through the Command Prompt anyway). You could replace “type NUL” with “echo.” if you wanted, but you’d end up with a 3-byte line break in the file, whereas this way you get a 0-byte file.

Windows cannot be installed to this disk. The selected disk is of the GPT partition style.

The reason is because the Mac OS uses the “GUID Partition Table” partition scheme, whereas Windows/DOS use what’s known as MBR (Master Boot Record). For whatever reason, the Windows installer is incapable of changing this (funny because I used to use Windows installation CD’s on drives I absolutely could not format with other operating systems and it always used to work).

In any case, you’ll need another program to repartion the drive first. I recommend Hiren’s Boot CD (once you go to that site, the link is way at the bottom just below the final ad). You can also use something like SeaTools if you’ve got a Seagate hard drive to wipe the thing clean (or another tool from another manufacturer).

The steps using Hiren’s Boot CD:

• Download the ISO on another computer and burn it the image to a CD or DVD.
• DISCONNECT any other USB drives and other hard drives on the computer you’re installing to so that you don’t accidentally delete stuff on hard drives you don’t want deleted! You should only have the 1 hard drive installed!!!!!
• Boot from the CD.
• Choose “Dos programs”
• Choose “Partition Tools”
• Choose “GParted Partition Editor” (it’s GUI and easy to use – if your mouse isn’t detected for some reason you’ll have to go crazy with the tab button though)
• Select the partitions on the hard drive. You might have 2 showing – a 200MB one (probably shows up as fat32) and the other large one that makes up most of the hard drive’s total size (probably shows up as hfs+).
• –To do this, you click “Partition” – “Delete” – after you’ve done it you need to click the “Apply” button to apply the changes. Remember to do this for all the partitions on the hard drive to wipe it clean.
• Now you should only have 1 item showing in the list – the unpartitioned drive. Click “Device” – “Create Partition Table”
• –The default is named fat or fat32 or ms-dos or something. It’s fine. You may have to “Apply” afterwards.
• Now create a new partition. Choose “Partition” – “New” and select “fat32″ from the side. You COULD choose NTFS, but I prefer to choose FAT32 so that Windows has to delete it and make a new NTFS that’s guaranteed to work. “Apply” again if necessary.
• Now eject the CD, put in your Windows CD, and hit the reset button on your computer.
• When you get to the hard drive screen on the Windows installer, it’ll have an error message at the bottom (where the old GPT message was) about the drive needing to be formatted as NTFS. Select the “Delete” option. Then click next and it’ll automatically format the drive as NTFS and install.
• Once Windows has finished installing, go ahead and reconnect any 2nd/3rd hard drives you had connected before.

I’ll note that ALL the above steps are probably not necessary. However, I prefer to be thorough, and this is the way I’ve done it both times and it worked perfectly.

It’s odd that the Windows installer is smart enough to detect the GPT partition scheme but not smart enough to overwrite it with an MBR scheme. Fortunately, there are other partition managers capable of doing it, and many are included in the Hiren Boot CD. It’s inconvenient, but it works well.

This issue affects the Windows Vista installation disk. It may also affect Windows 7 install DVD and Windows XP installer CD.

It’s pretty easy to do:

1. right-click on an empty area of the task bar
2. choose “Properties”
3. select the “Use small icons” checkbox
4. click “Apply”

The task bar will shrink. Program icons will change to the size of the icons in your notification area. Only the time will display in the far right (the date will disappear because there’s no room for it below the time anymore, although you can always mouse over the time to see the date).

In the guide, it’s mentioned that during the install, when it reboots (the first time), you can opt to boot the installer again and run compact.exe on the drive through the Repair/CommandPrompt section.

The idea behind it is that some Netbooks have small SSD’s, and it can save you some space. What about those with large slow standard notebook drives though? Is there any speed increase/advantage?

Here’s where I tried to find out.

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The hypothesis is that reading from a notebook drive is generally slow. If you compress the data, there’s less to read on the drive which is good (it should speed things up). The trade-off is that the CPU has to decompress the files as they’re read into memory (which may slow things down).

So how does it work out? Like this:

Blue=standard Red=compact.exe

I apologize for the small text in the key (darn Google Docs…). The blue bars are the results for a default install. The red bars are the results when compact.exe was run on the drive during the install.

More specifically, the times (taken with a stopwatch from the moment I hit enter at the boot menu) were as follows:

Default Install:
51.2 seconds to Desktop (2nd reboot)
51.7 seconds to startup chime (2nd reboot, estimated)

compact.exe Install:
47.1 seconds to Desktop (2nd reboot)
52.3 seconds to startup chime (3rd reboot)

You’ll notice something odd. In the default install, the startup chime came immediately after the desktop showed up. In the compact.exe install, the desktop showed up earlier, but the startup chime was delayed a few seconds. In fact, the chime came up around the same time as the default install.

One thing to note is that compact.exe fragments the files. The hard drive showed as 43% fragmented afterwards! Defragmenting the compacted hard drive may bring the boot times down even more!

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Test Method:

This was done on an MSI L1300 Netbook. It looks to be exactly the same as the MSI Wind U130 (specs are the same, and MSI redirects you to the MSI Wind U130′s drivers when you try to grab drivers for the L1300).
Intel Atom N450 (1.66Ghz)
1GB DDR2 RAM
1GB SATA WDC WD1600BEVT-22A23T0 (Western Digital 5400RPM) hard drive
Windows 7 Home Professional 32-bit was the OS used.

It was a fresh install for both scenerios. The netbook was restarted twice after the installation finished. For both restarts, the default install had the startup chime immediately after the desktop showed up, whereas the compact.exe install had the startup chime seconds later (which is why a 3rd restart was done to get an exact reading). Time was taken with a stopwatch program, and should be accurate to within 1/4 second or so.

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Thoughts

In hindsight, I should have run additional tests having programs start up at boot. I really wanted to avoid adding variables though (prefetch etc), which is why I did this in a basic boot-only, virgin manner.

It appears that there’s no disadvantage to using compact.exe. At best it shaved a few seconds from the boot time, and at worst was about the same in terms of the start-up chime (well within the margin for error anyway).

If you’re using the N450, or another Atom chip that’s comparable or faster, I’d recommend going through the compact.exe process if using a non-SSD hard drive (a 5400RPM drive anyway).

If you’ve got a slower chip, I’d suggest benchmarking for yourself to see. Remember that decompressing on the fly does use some processor power which might otherwise be going to other start-up tasks.

Again, if using an SSD, it’s almost certainly not worth it speed-wise – the biggest reason here is to reduce the space taken.

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Final notes on the compact.exe process:

This is done during install. See the Gizmodo Netbook Article for details.

Running compact.exe took just under an hour on my hard drive.

56155 files were compacted. Size was reduced from 8.7GB to 5.9GB. The overall compression ratio was 1.5:1

compact.exe fragments the files (43% fragmented in my case!). Run disk defragmenter afterwards.

I had a pretty low power machine with an i3, integrated video, etc. It’s life long dream was of course to be our new file server so that I could start shutting off my sauna-in-a-case rig that was serving files 24/7 while out-performing our home furnace in heat output.

The i3 got it’s wish. It’s serving files, the other one’s off, and my room’s 10 degrees colder.

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Enough blathering though.

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Here’s what I like about FreeNAS:

1. ZFS – If you don’t know what the ZFS file system is, it’s pretty bloody amazing – look it up. Look up RAIDZ in particular (the RAID5 of ZFS). Yes, FreeNAS supports the other junk (FAT/32, NTFS, HFS+, EXT#, UFS, etc), but ZFS is just… well… so good. It’s not *all* roses, but I’ll explain that later.
2. Installs to a USB memory stick – This is pretty key. One less hard drive to power, less heat, more room in the case. It’s got a small memory footprint which it also pops into RAM.
3. Headless administration – once installed, it can be administered through your browser (just like a router). No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor required.
4. E-mail alerts – This is a biggie. If you decide to run it headless and a hard drive fails… how will you know? I suppose if you’re running a single drive you’ll figure it out when you can’t access it, but when you’re running a headless RAID5/6/etc, a dead drive in your array might be a good thing to know about. You can up FreeNAS to email you alerts (as long as you’ve got an internet connection of course).
5. Graphical interface (ties in to #3). It does fall short here sometimes, but I’ll rag on it a little further down.
6. A pile of protocols/services. You’ve got the regular networking options (CIFS/SMB, AFP, NFS), the techie stuff (FTP, SSH, RSync, etc), the fun stuff (iTunes server, BitTorrent), and a few others.

There’s more when you get into the details, but in terms of comparing the major overall features, the above is what really helped it stand out for me (except for #6, many others have a whole slew of services too).

As I said earlier though, it’s not all roses.

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FreeNAS ZFS

ZFS, for all it’s sheer awesomeness isn’t perfect. For starters (and this is a FreeNAS thing), only the more recent versions of ZFS have data deduplication. What’s data de-duplication? Well, Windows Home Server has a feature where if you have 2 copies of the exact same file, it’ll only physically store one of them to save space. ZFS goes beyond that, and in addition to that, if you have *parts* of a file that are the same, it’ll only physically store one copy of those parts. All automatically in the background (assuming it’s turned on of course). FreeNAS from what I gather will eventually get this, but it could be a while yet, while other NAS’s like Nexenta and EON already have it.

ZFS also has it’s own issues (unrelated to FreeNAS).

For instance, you can enable various compression levels through gzip, or use lzjb. Depending on your processor power, amount of RAM, and hard drive speeds, this can actually speed up file transfers in addition to saving you space. Sounds good, right? Well… not completely. Enabling compression caused FreeNAS to restart on certain files in my case. If you don’t have enough RAM, you can have problems with ZFS. If you haven’t configured something you needed to, you can have problems.

What this really boils down to is that as powerful and awesome as ZFS is, it’s not always an out-of-the-box-stable-and-it-works sort of thing. You’re supposed to configure different settings for ZFS, first to make it stable with your configuration, and then to tweak it. A 32-bit install may need different settings than a 64-bit install. Compare this to the other file systems that are generally rock-solid out of the box even without a lick of configuration.

For those who’ve run servers, it’s similar to tweaking MySQL. You have to learn, do a little trial and error, and in the end you can have a pretty amazing set-up, utilizing all the power you can harness. It’s not beginner friendly though. It would help if FreeNAS had some built-in GUI goodness to help with this, but it doesn’t.

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Installation

As long as you’re comfortable setting up your network configuration (really not much more than your IP address and subnet mask), you’re fine there. The only real issue I had here was that you need to burn a CD first, then use it to install on the memory stick. Since the CD-ROM will presumably never see use again, you’ll end up wanting to take it out again until the next upgrade, when you’ll have to burn a new disk.

There is a way to just download the image, but you can’t install it through the Mac’s Disk Utility (I believe they linked some software to do it with).

It’s not the end of the world, and might seem like a nitpick, but it’s really just an annoyance. I thought we started using USB sticks so we didn’t have to touch CD’s anymore!

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Learning Curve and Lack of GUI stuff

Earlier I compared the headless aspect (and GUI) to setting up a router, but someone who’s *just* figured out how to set up their router is in for a bit of a learning curve. To be completely fair, most of the other stuff that acts as a NAS requires you to do just about everything through the command line (ZFS being a big one). FreeNAS does let you do 90% of the stuff through the GUI, but there are a few things there that will completely lose some people. ZFS configuration being one. Another being setting permissions for things that need it (like AFS). The GUI does so well that it’s easy to see the places where it does fall short right now. Someone who’s never had to look at a command prompt / terminal /etc is going to have a really easy time with most things, and then a painfully brutal time with others.

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Conclusion

All-in-all, FreeNAS is arguably one of the best solutions out there right now. It does have it’s flaws, but as time goes on it’s almost certain to improve dramatically.

I could get guests to read.

I could get users to read.

I couldn’t get anyone to write.

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For whatever reason, it took a few searches before I came across the mac section of the FreeNAS documentation here. In any case, I’m going to guess that not everyone who uses FreeNAS is an SSH guru (although if you are you can just read the above link and skip the rest). Here’s the somewhat-easy-but-I’m-still-not-happy-about-it-way of doing it…

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1) Hopefully you got to the point where you made users and put them in the same group.
a) If not, find Access/Users_And_Groups in the menu;
b) create a group (name it something easy)
c) create users (at least one for you!) and add them to your new group
It should look something like this afterwards:

In the above example, "family" is the group. Since my name is Matt, "Matt" is the user we'll be focusing on for the rest. The actual UID numbers used for the user and groups don't really matter - just use the defaults.

d) Make sure you’ve also set up an AFP share (Services/AFP/Shares). The next part here might not matter, but may as well do it anyway just in case – stick your username in the Read/Write access part (may be case sensitive, so be sure to capitalize if necessary).

2) Assuming you got everything in #1 done, it’s time to get you some read/write access. Here’s how we do it:
a) First you need the location of the folder. Easiest way to get this is to navigate to Services/AFP/Shares (just like in the step above), and find the Path. Look below to see what mine looked like:

The part we're interested is highlighted. Select it and copy it to the clipboard (Apple-C on your keyboard or right-click and choose "Copy").

In my case it was /mnt/SeagateZFS/MainStorage/ – select whatever yours is and copy it to the keyboard.

3) Next (and finally), we’re going to issue a couple commands, similar to what’s on the page linked at the very beginning. Head to the Advanced/Command menu.
a) Type in:

chown  macuser:macgroup  /mnt/yourvolume/yoursharedfolder

Replace macuser and macgroup with your name and group from step#1. Use the stuff from step#2 as /mnt/yourvolume/yoursharedfolder (you can either Apple-V or right-click paste to get that part in). I used double-spaces in the above to make it easier to read, but just using single spaces. As an example, mine was:

Hit execute. Not much will happen, except that it’ll display the command you just sent.

b) Type in:

chmod 2775 /mnt/yourvolume/yoursharedfolder

Again, similar to the above, except that where it says /mnt/yourvolume/yoursharedfolder, you’re pasting the stuff from your clipboard (from step#2) again.

Mine looked something like this:

Hit execute.

You’re done. Hopefully things should work. At the very least, you should be able to disconnect/reconnect and start copying files or create folders through your own account. Hopefully other people in your group will have access too, but verify to make sure they have the limited (or unlimited as the case may be) access you want them to have.

If you’re completely lost as to what exactly you just did, you basically just took ownership of the folder with your user account, and assigned it to your group on the filesystem / operating system level.

Hopefully in the future, someone makes changes to make things a little less cumbersome. Granted, there’s not a lot that can be done, but if the FreeNAS GUI automated the permissions setttings (or at least presented a GUI to do it), it would make it a little easier for people. A *very* good place for this would be a new item in the Access Menu called “file and folder permissions” or something to that effect. The menu item could list the shares or the dataset and have a “choose owner”, “choose group”, and “set owner/group/user permissions” section for each share. Worst case scenerio, giving the file manager a facelift and doing it there would help too.

3 hours later….

(warning: before going any further, this is for a clean installation – if you’ve got data on those drives, it’s gonna be gone if you keep reading…)

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What you need to do to fix it is:

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0) pre-step: Delete all your entries in the ZFS section. You’ve probably got entries in the Virtual Device (Pools), Management (Pools), and Dataset (Datasets) sections. Remove them all, and don’t forget to update/save. We’re trying to get things in a clean state here.
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1) Click Disks/Management from the main menu.
2) Delete all the entries for your current drives (then save the changes).
3) Create new entries. HOWEVER, this time for the formatting you’re going to LEAVE ALL THE DEFAULTS and choose NTFS for the “Preformatted File System” (don’t worry, we’ll be changing it back to “ZFS Storage Pool Device” later). Do this for every drive you’re using, and save/apply the changes.
4) Click Disks/Format from the main menu.
5) One at a time, select each disk, choose ZFS Storage Pool Device as the File System, then hit Format disk.
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6) Now you should be able to create the Virtual Device, and the actual Management Pool. Once the pool’s added, you should be seeing proper numbers instead of “UNKNOWN”, and ideally everything should be working from here on in.

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So what causes this behavior?

In the past I’ve run into issues where FileSystem B will not install properly on a drive that currently has FileSystem A on it. In those cases, I’ve either had to do a low-level format first to completely zero everything out, or try to do an intermediate partition/format with a FileSystem C, then try B again. Presumably, a similar thing happened here.

Now, this hasn’t happened for years before now (although the Mac OS X bootloader likes to resist being installed to drives that had other partition types sometimes), but I seem to recall it being an NTFS-FAT-EXT# circle that had issues in the past. As far as the hard drives I was using for this FreeNAS install, one had a Mac HFS+ partition, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the culprit that ZFS didn’t like.

In any case, what we’ve done above is essentially partition/format the drives as NTFS first, which ZFS didn’t have a problem overwriting. In the event you don’t have luck with NTFS as your intermediate file system, try the other partition types. If all else fails, I’d recommend grabbing the diagnostic tool from your hard drive manufacturer (SeaTools for Seagate drives for example), and use it to do a low level format and try again.

gzip: stdout: Broken pip
Error: Failed to dd image on ‘/dev/da0′
Unmount CDROM.
There was a problem while copying files.

Fortunately, the fix is easy.

Step 1: Restart the computer WITHOUT the USB drive plugged in.
Step 2: Let the Live CD boot completely until you’re back at the same menu.
Step 3: Plug the USB drive in, then choose the option to install. It should now work.

From what I read when looking around, it looks like while the CD boots it installs some temporary files of some sort to the USB drive if it’s plugged in at the time, which causes the above error. Just wait until it’s finished booting – the installer’s smart enough to find your USB drive once it’s plugged in.

There are significantly fewer Macs than Windows machines, so hackers don’t bother making viruses for them. Macs are just as insecure as Windows, they just don’t get targetted.

This is of course, incorrect.

Here’s the real reason (don’t worry, I’ll elaborate):

Mac:	Windows:
You will see something like this when updating a typical Mac program.	You will see something like this when updating a typical Windows program.

Woah. Wait. Both are updating a program. What’s the difference?

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In short, every time you install or update a Windows program, you’re forced to give it full access to your computer. Every. Single. Time. Firefox needs an update? Grant full access. Java needs an update? Grant full access. Some other random program needs to update? Grant full… you get the idea.

Now you might be thinking, “I have to grant every program full access to my computer for it to update itself? That seems silly”. And you’d be right. There’s no reason that every random program should be given full access to your machine. That would be like a bank giving keys to the vault to every customer that walked in.

If Microsoft ran a bank, the vault would be empty.

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Things are different on the Mac. If a program needs to update, it just asks you, and then updates itself. All without needing full access. It makes sense.

To be fair, there are a few Mac exceptions. Generally, they’re programs that need to touch system files, interact directly with drivers, or embed themselves in the system for another reason.

Some actually need access to the whole system:
-Mac OS X software updates
-Virtual Machine software (Parallels, VMWare, etc)
-Anti-virus programs
-A few edge-case programs (things that add themselves to the System Preferences panel for example)

Others don’t need access to the whole system, but request it because they’re either poorly programmed or contain DRM:
-Microsoft Office for Mac (poorly programmed)
-Microsoft Messenger for Mac (poorly programmed)
-all other microsoft products for the mac (poorly programmed)
-Adobe Photoshop (DRM)
-few others

The way the Mac goes about dealing with these is that it asks for your username and password. If you supply that info, it’ll allow the program that’s installing/updating to have full access to the system.

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So wait!? How is this different? Why does this matter?

Most Windows users are greeted with UAC prompts multiple times per week (multiple times per day in some cases). What’s worse is that many don’t know what they’re for. Something says it needs to update, so they click OK. If they don’t, it often keeps bugging them until they do.

On the Mac, it’s very seldom that the prompt comes up asking for the username + password. The few times they do pop up, there’s generally a good indication as to what it’s there for.

From a virus writer’s standpoint, who are you going to target? The lost Windows users who have already hit “Allow” a dozen times in the last week? Or the Mac user who’s going to have alarm bells going off in their head when they unexpectedly see a prompt asking for their password?

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So, why do Windows machines get more viruses than Macs…?

It’s the design.

Windows was designed around the philosophy that everything can and should have full access to your system. This worked well in the past, but the deficiencies in the design have become all too apparent and are now being exploited at every opportunity. There’s a problem when your OS expects dad/grandma/junior to click “Allow” multiple times throughout the day to keep current with various program updates, when they’re not going to have any clue what is actually being “allowed” most of the time.

Mac OS X on the other hand is based on a solid foundation from a security standpoint (Unix). The philosophy around it is the user doesn’t get full access the the system, so programs won’t either. The OS is designed so that a typical program will never need full access, whether it’s installing or being updated. Dad/grandma/junior aren’t bombarded with prompts they know nothing about. The few times they’re actually asked to authorize a program to do something, they generally have a good notion as to why they’re being prompted, and in the event they don’t, they’re much more likely to hit Cancel, or at least ask someone for some guidance.

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Granted, if Macs had higher market share, they’d be more of a target for virus writers than they are today. However, regardless of the market share, Windows will always be the prime target. After all, why would someone write a virus for the Mac when Windows so readily hands you the keys to the castle?

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Disclaimer: I do not work for Apple or Microsoft. I do however use both Mac OS X, and the Windows 7 operating system on a regular basis.