Ah! Windows 8 - perhaps you should have a look here -
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/08/22/germany-warns-windows-8-is-dangerous-is-microsoft-a-giant-short/For all other versions of windows there's this link -
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/microsoft-programmed-in-nsa-backdoor-in-windows-by-1999.htmlWhat about giving one of the MANY distributions of Linux a try!
Operating system -Free
Office Packages - Free
Video / Graphics editors - Free
41000 other packages - free
There are plenty of flavours to appeal to almost everyone. For those a little scared of it...I recommend one of the Linux Mint versions,KDE is my favourite,it feels a lot like windows,is extremely elegant and incredibly stable, a quick demo can be found here -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtuRC5jZT8QLinux Mint 13 ( old versions )- KDE vs MATE vs Cinnamon -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW9CNk3V2ccAnd for those that say...I need to run software that only runs on windows...There's a program called Wine that will run a lot of windows programs or you could always elect to dual boot during installation.
Please PLEASE people! Shed your misconceptions! Try Linux, download a version and run it from cd, see if you like it ( no changes are made to your computer unless you install ).
Like everything new.. there is a learning curve with Linux , and like everything else the more you put into it the more you get out.
If you have a new laptop....you need disable UEFI in the bios.
No need for anti virus or malware protection, but Linux is vulnerable to corrupted code from source just like any other OS.
However, it will not go unnoticed.
All the code gets gone over again and again by thousands of developers who have to modify their own packages to suit any changes made.
People will know very quickly if malicious code gets inserted.
I don't know how Linux could ever be compromised without a solution spreading through the community like wild fire.
Posted using Firefox on Linux Mint KDE
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0
HawkEye