The Register: Infected in 20 minutes
Exactly how vulnerable is a computer running Windows XP that is sitting unprotected on the internet? Apparently, very vulnerable. Twenty minutes is all it takes for such a computer to be infected. This article takes a look at the problems faced by the common user when they gety that new computer home and hook it up to the internet for the very first time.
It is actually a rather scary read when you consider the implications.
A while back there was a thread going on the List about how to protect a computer from the time you first install the OS to when you can download all the security patches from Microsoft. What prompted this was several people who had to reinstall Windows onto their computer and by the time they could get the required patches had already been infected with Code Red or the Blaster worm (or one of the other nasty worms/virus’ crawling around on the web).
Personally, my suggestion is just switch to Linux.