Personally when I read about Windows 7′s new “XP mode” I thought maybe Microsoft had grasped the problem and were putting a sensible solution in place to enable them to free themselves from the shackles of backward compatibility without losing too many customers along the way ( clearly nothing innovative here as this is what Apple did by rolling OS 9 into OS X when it was released in 2000 ), however when I read the full gen on this and realised that this “slick” integration actually requires you to install Virtual PC and then XP and then Antivirus and firewall software for XP etc I was forced to concede that yet again Microsoft have completely missed the point !

Sorry Redmond but I think you have some tough times ahead and some tough decisions to make, and to be honest I think I agree with Daniel that from past history it is unlikely you will make the right ones.

Personally I have free access to Sophos Anti-virus through licence at work, though I have to admit that currently I don’t have Sophos or any other product installed.

Let me know what you think ? Are Mac users in danger of becoming complacent, or is there really no real threat to our security ?

A trip to Argos later and we were back at the house installing on the kitchen iMac. After 10 minutes or so the install was complete and we were ready to fire it up for the first time. Unfortunately when the game tried to contact EA’s licence servers it failed for some reason and just displayed an error message asking us to try again in a short while ! Ben was gutted as you would expect…

Over on the EA Forums for Spore I found a number of threads complaining about Internet servers ( authentication and licence ) being under capacity and failing to allow excited new owners to play. While we “waited a while” I decided to check a few other options to make sure the error was valid. Ben’s account on the iMac is setup as a Standard User ( not an Administrator ) and additionally has Parental Controls switched on. As a test I logged in as Admin, switched Parental Controls off and made Ben an Administrator then switched back to Bens account and tried again.

Hey presto, connection went through straight away and Ben was able to get down to the serious business of “evolving”.

A minor frustration and one I am routinely faced with in the world of Microsoft where the vast majority of consumer applications appear to require that the user is a machine administrator to run them, but not something I have come across in the last 4-5 years I have been a Mac user. I suppose it is fair to say that this is the first commercial game I have bought for a Mac which is a shame as it may well put me off buying further titles ( especially from EA ).

You would think that after 7 years of development a simple bug like this would have been spotted wouldn’t you?