We need computer penicillin

For the past few days, I've been my firewall [1] has been catching a huge upswing in the number of computers attempting to connect trying to connect to mine of port 445. It's hundreds per day, sometimes five to six per minute. They're mostly from various level3.net IPs, similar to mine. (I think my ISP rents lines from Level3.) That's one of the ports that WinXP uses for sharing folders, but I think this is primarily due to variants of the Korgo virus attempting to spread.

For crying out loud, who on Earth these days connects a Windows machine to the Internet without some form of virus protection? We don't live in an era where you have to click on some emailed attachment anymore, some of these viruses spread just through defects in the Windows networking layer. It's not just unwise, it's irresponsible not to have a virus scanner running on your computer. It's not like they're particularly expensive.

It's almost enough to get me to switch to a Mac.

[1] ZoneAlarm Basic, free for personal use. Download here.