Hmmm,

The most I encountered was just over 1700. The Laptop had "stopped working" I was told.

It was something like a PI/120 with 128Mb of RAM. Win 98 and 56.6 dial up.

It was used by a small hotel for bookings and correspondence and was probably on the net for short periods about 4 times a week.

The problems were:

1. No firewall
2. No AV
3. Outlook Express with preview turned "on"

What had happened (apart from the malware) was that they had received a spam e-mail with a corrupted header and this was freezing OE.

It seems that back then a fair bit of spam also carried adware and spyware. Being a hotel, they were on several trade listings so they got a fair amount of spam.

Once I got rid of the rubbish and turned off OE preview, all I had to do was show them how to open OE and delete the spam before it opened. A firewall and AV rounded things off.

I am not entirely sure that a lot of malware will neccessarily kill the PC. I think that a fair bit of it checks to see if it is running and will only allow one instance, even though there might be several hundred files involved.

I have also seen stuff hiding in places like the Java cache, that presumably require you to run Java to activate?