About 3 months ago, our media-center PC became infected with the HORRIBLE Win7 trojan. If you're not familiar with it, count yourself lucky. It's one of those trojans that installs itself on your PC and tells you that you have fake viruses and that you need to purchase their product to clean your computer...the worst part being that they've emulated the look and feel of Microsoft Security Essentials which is what I use on my PC's. Basically if you've been infected with this trojan, YOU"LL NEVER GET RID OF IT! Everything I tried would not get rid of this thing off the computer, and my wife's laptop as well. We had to wipe both hard-drives and start from scratch. It worked fine on the laptop, but wouldn't you know, I ran into a few snags with the media-center pc. When I bought it originally it was a Vista computer. After Windows 7 came out, I'd upgraded it, but alas, I failed to make a clean boot disk. So when I tried to use the old, original boot disk I'd made for Vista, it wouldn't install, I just kept getting a corrupted data warning.
Well, I wasn't about to shell out money for a brand new install of Windows 7, so I decided to go the open source route and installed Ubuntu, a free version of Linux. All in all, I haven't been to upset about the change. It has a clean interface (the classic gui that is), and does pretty much everything my windows 7 pc does. The only 2 real complaints I have about it is, it doesn't support single-clicking (you have to double-click to open programs) and Netflix doesn't allow you to stream movies to it, because of Ubuntu being open-source I guess, and the software that Netflix uses for streaming is proprietary. You can watch Hulu though, and just about any other video site works as well. I've never tried, but I imagine I'd have trouble with my bank's website as well, and probably other sites where transactions are involved, not sure about that though. I've still got windows 7 on my laptop, but if they'd ever fix it where I could stream Netflix and do my online shopping through Ubuntu, I could see myself slipping the corporate leash for good and going freeware!
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