I remeber fondly my first virus, on an Amiga 1000, sometime in the early to mid '80's "Somthing wonderfull has happened, your computer is alive, even better, it has a virus" "cool!" we all thought, "never seen that before..." Now while it's not technically impossible to get a virus under Linux, it is very unlikely, far more unlikely than on either the Mac or PC platforms. There is even some conjecture that Linux is not that much safer than windows, however in it's default build, as a home user system I would have to reckon that Linux is safer than Windows if only for what isn't switched on by default... That said, the choice of OS is more a religious one than anything else, and you will need to buy and configure other programs if you want to run PC programs. In fact you're probably better of buying a cheap box and using that as a DMZ of sorts, install just windows, a virus checker and a firewall on it, and only connect to the 'net with that. That way if it screws up it's simple to re-install. If all you realy want is Poser then you're better off sticking with windows. Just keep it off the 'net and individually virus check everything you download, and you should be fine. Just leave your "Poser" PC off the 'net, it's good to backup the stuff you've downloaded anyway, usefull for crash recoveries... :) later jb