This whole discussion really shouldn't be happening

Mike Tester said: "MS have NEVER released ANYTHING that works properly!"

How can you say that? I still use MSDos6.22 on a daily basis and it works very well. Of course I only use the "kernel", having replaced everything else with non MS ustilities, but still, it's rock solid and lightning fast. One of the best things about it is that any virus infection is quickly noticable and easily found. In fact, I haven't had an infection since before 6.2 came out and my kid used to bring viruses home from elementary school. In those days they were mostly harmless boot sector viruses which we got used to fixing. My point is that it was simple enough to be under my control and not so complicated that the programmers didn't know what they were doing. MicroSoft used to write very good software. Of course, Mike is right, but I would say that it wasn't until MS went to a windowing system that things started going wrong. They got in over their heads and the software became unprofessional.

I don't even know what a modern virus looks like. When DOS became too difficult to use for the net, Linux was ready for simpletons like me and I started using that for interfacing with the "cruel world". I've never had any malware, that despite the huge number of vulnerabilities in Linux. Perhaps I'm just too stupid to get a virus, I don't know, but I've had a machine connected to the net 24/7 for a number of years now. I don't especially like Linux but I don't want to go backwards and be charged for it. I'm just not going to pay good money for an OS unless it can compete with DOS on a basic level so I use what I can get for free. I can't imagine paying for an OS and then having to deal with malware.

People who bought into the MS windows line of OSes seem to have experienced increasing problems. It really looks like MS, and operating systems in general, have developed to the point where no one knows how to operate them properly ... even the manufactures. It's very unprofessional to be trying to sell an OS which has problems that are beyond the programmers control. They're obviously atempting more than they are capabable of doing. Maby it's time to scale back to a level that matches their (and their customers) abilities.