I love how one of the things they are doing to improve security is "We highly recommend our customers enable Automatic Update to ensure they are protected from attacks." Okay, you improve the security in the product by recommending people use it safely. I'm impressed. Then again, they also claim that Parental Controls make it safer... The heck? This is about an enterprise company, not a family computer!

I block all ads except those on sites run by independent content providers I like who depend upon ads for income. And even then, I have flash block on. (Bloody flash slows this old system down with no remorse.) The use of Flash for non-necessary purposes is pretty much a captial offense in my book due to it's resource-hogging and non-easily viewable nature on non x86 machines.

Now, the single stupidest thing I've ever seen crash an OS - HP Memory Disc Creator. Came with our printer, installed in WinXP by the parental units and foregotten about until three years later when it caused Windows XP to BSOD with stop errors on boot. I checked online, and this was a known issue by Microsoft with an update. (Facepalm) Now, couldn't the updater check for this known issue and warn/uninstall the useless software? Apparently not. And what was a "Memory Disc Creator" (whatever that is) doing in a key enough location to cause boot crashes? It didn't even launch anything at startup!

This is pretty much a reality with every OS I've ever tried. Linux may not quite halt-and-catch-fire when the X drivers hang, but good luck getting a working screen afterwards to do any work on without a hard reset, as the keyboard and mouse were stolen by Xorg.

The ironic part is that I am currently using Xubuntu after leaving Windows because Windows *wasn't* working. I'd prefer a system of all free software (because that means better support for me, given my past experience), but I'm not particularly hung up over having binary NVIDIA and Atheros drivers on my system. The same is true with Flash - sure, it sucks (even on Windows), but I'd rather see the videos I'm linked to than not. Plus, in my general experience, a new copy of Vista takes several hours to get to work "right" for me. A new Ubuntu install takes about three setting changes and a rather large apt-get.