We all speak from our varied experiences, of course. I greatly respect IT professionals who have forgotten more than I will ever know about computers. and when they say things like "you should install all available updates, always," I take a step a back and consider the wisdom in doing this. But my experience, limited and personal as it is, is that I always have had all kinds of problems on windows systems. for example, on my music computer, I have had to reinstall windows 7 twice (including a boatload of programs for my music creation), because, apparently, I unplugged an external hard drive without safely removing it first. Hey, sometimes you just forget. This kind of thing does not happen on Linux. It is smarter that way. not that I haven't had problems with Linux. I've tried about 15-20 distros (also a couple BSD distros), and they all have their little quirks. some proved unusable on my particular system. But Linux keeps getting better. And of course it's more secure than Windows. At this point, except for music, for which I must use windows, I am definitely a Linux guy. And eventually she will be a Linux gal, I hope, except for the Windows 7 relic systems we will keep, along with our Gateway Pentium Windows 98 relic system. She won't let me get rid of it, even though she never uses it. but I've reinstalled W98 and boosted the memory to a whopping 380 MBs, the max it can take. It boots up faster than any of our systems, and we still have all the cool CDs that it came with. Ah, the nineties. The last great decade, as they say...