BBC quotes a Yahoo study that says spam and viruses put the average computer down for the count approximately nine days a year:
Research commissioned by Yahoo finds that the average British PC has nine ‘sick days’ per year, two more than the average for workers.
Six of these are wasted battling with spam and three more days are lost due to viruses.
Nearly half of British computer users find dealing with junk e-mails more stressful than traffic jams and the majority want service providers to act.
I’m always a little skeptical of these studies, which tend to be done for marketing reasons, not in a quest for actual facts that can be used to set, you know, sensible policies. I’m also puzzled at how they arrived at the notion of six “sick days” dealing with spam. I can understand that cleaning up a virus can be messy and time consuming. But getting rid of spam means either creating filters, installing filtering software, or hitting the Delete key. It may take several minutes a day, but that’s a nuisance, not true downtime. And multiplying those minutes by the number of working days in the year to find the actual “cost” of spam is bogus science.
Nonetheless, the principle is an interesting one. So how many computer “sick days” do you have every year? Click the Comments button below and let me know.
(Via Techdirt)
Ed Bott 
Judging from the small network we have at my office (4 or 5 Windows 2K and NT4 PCs, a few Linux boxes and several VOIP appliances), my results differ considerably from the study.
Our network connection also supports a web server, mail server and is constantly being used for some net connected testing of VOIP devices or some other digital nonsense.
I can recall only one computer actually “off the air” due to virus or spyware/adware. But its owner visits some rather eclectic websites.
Every Windows machine with full time user is running Outlook 2002 as a mail client, so most of the malicious junk that arrives is already filtered away. We also run SpamFighter, which picks off probably 80% of the spam we get. The 2K machines are on automatic update. The Linux machines check for updates every night and any updates are automatic. Emails of all activity, both normal and suspicious are sent to me every morning, so I can see what, if any unusual activity has taken place within the last 24 hours.
Surprisingly, we only run A-V software on our file server (not really a server, but a peer machine running Win2K) and not on the client machines.