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My personal hope is that that someday, Microsoft chucks out the albatross of the NT codebase and migrates their systems to something that is intrinsically more secure and stable by design. Hell, they could do what Apple did, use UNIX as the base and run their GUI and userland stuff on it. Windows could make a quantum leap that way, IMO.

Unfortunately, if they do, the primary motivation will be to build in even more (and more intrusive) spyware and malware, and getting that to work will be Job 1. If they do happen to improve the architecture from a security (from others than them and the NSA) standpoint, it would be only an afterthought with minimal quality control (and may even be impossible to do well as it might then pose difficulties for their own spyware).

>> My personal hope is that that someday, Microsoft chucks out the albatross of the NT codebase ...

> Unfortunately, if they do, the primary motivation will be to build in even more (and more intrusive) spyware and malware...

Well, I'm sure they'd migrate their nasty stuff to the new base structure, but I can't imagine it would be much more or less intrusive than what they're doing and plan to do with the NT codebase. So I don't see it as a downside, just more of the same, and maybe easier to build because they could design it in instead of bolt it on. But that's just my guess.

Larger picture: I don't think that Microsoft is intrinsically any better or worse than Google, Facebook, or other agencies that get hold of your personal information and use it to generate marketing data to sell or use themselves. I don't like how much these agencies know about my purchases, browsing history, downloads, etc. Microsoft is easy to pick on because they provide the platform most people use. I choose to use Linux or Mac for most things, and use Windows for those Windows-only programs I need to run.

> I'm in the Recovering-Win-Migrating-to-Linux phase of grief, but philosophically, that would be my choice as well if it were available. Fortunately, I don't have to do anything in OSX, so it's moot for me. Windows and Linux play reasonably nice together.

Yeah, I get that. My work life is cluttered -- here a Linux box with a VM of Windows, there a Windows box with a VM of Linux, yonder a box with a VM of itself, for software testing that might destroy the installed system... servers with VMware ESX and clients of Solaris UNIX, FreeBSD, Windows, and Linux, all on the same piece of hardware... I could not function these days without VMs that allow multiple environments in a single piece of hardware.

The dirty secret is: It's also really a great deal of fun, and in nearly every instance, beats hell out of dual/multi-booting.

Sorry to hear about the grief, but I predict it will get better, and sooner rather than later. :-)