April 1, 2009 -- The online war between Apple and PC fanboys took an unexpected turn Tuesday.
The young woman featured in a Microsoft Windows commercial snubbing Apple Macbooks for being too expensive announced Tuesday she had contracted the Conficker worm on her new PC.
The Los Angeles-based actress, "Lauren," stirred up a lot of online angst between Apple and PC fans when she starred in the Microsoft commercial deriding Apple Macs as being too expensive.
In the commercial, the 20-something Lauren is given $1,000 to buy any 17" laptop she wants.
At one point, she walks out of the Apple Store and says she can't afford a Mac.
"I would have to double my budget, which isn't feasible," Lauren says, driving away from an Apple Store, where 17-inch notebooks start at $2,799. Then she sighs and launches the ad's main assault: "I'm just not cool enough to be a Mac person."
On Tuesday, it appeared she was lamenting her decision.
"My computer was compromised," she said at a press conference. "Who knows what information they stole."
When asked by a reporter if she now wishes she'd purchased an Apple, because its OS X operating system was not vulnerable to the Conficker worm, the actress seemed taken aback.
"Really, the virus doesn't affect Macs?," she asked incredulously.
She then begin calculating how much she gets paid an hour as an actress, versus the amount of time she will spend wiping her hard drive, reinstalling windows and all her other programs, and now having to monitor her credit history daily because of the threat of ID theft.
"Oh my god, I'm going to lose money on this deal. I'm going to lose money on a free computer," she said. "I should have got a Mac."
The actress recalled for reporters how the HP laptop she purchased with Microsoft money came installed with Windows Vista, but upon the urging of a "Geeky friend" she had removed it and instead gone with Windows XP.
"The whole computer just ran so slow," she said. "My friend said it would be a lot faster with the other Windows."
Microsoft issued an official comment on its Web site stating that if she installed the security patch issued in October for XP, she would not have been infected. But the actress got a copy of XP from her friend, meaning it was likely a pirated copy.
Apple declined to comment for this fake April Fool's Day story. A Linux spokesman tried to comment, but as a member of the MSM I ignored her.




<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:0bb6a07c-c829-4562-8375-49e6693810c7&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Laptop Hunters $1000 - Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion">Video: Laptop Hunters $1000 - Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion</a>