Tallima: ...
I almost went back to 7, but in 5 years, I'll be stuck with 10 still. So why bother? I'm just delaying the inevitable. And after having my CC stolen a few times and different accounts hacked a few times, it'll be nice not to have to re-image every 6 months just to keep the hackers off us.
Thank you! I was looking in an entirely different place to add these things. Thank you again!
dick1982: ok, not sure if you're serious but just forget for a few minutes that i am supposedly a windows "shill" or "fanboy", and read this... www.utica.edu/academic/institutes/cimip/idcrimes/schemes.cfm
phishing is the most common(and according to the stats, the most effective) method for stealing credit card numbers and particulars. and before the internet was a thing, dumpster diving and stealing receipts thrown away at ATM machines was also a common method used by credit car fraudsters. (as for fraudsters going through your personal trash, AFAIK only known high-income individuals get targeted for that.)
you might want to be more careful with who or where you giving away your personal details to. and tear up those receipts unless you're keeping them for tax accounting.
as for hacked accounts, if your password can be found on any list of common passwords that password cracking programs use, you're vunerable no matter what OS you use. especially if you store personal info in your email account, and use the same password on various accounts. if your email account has personal particulars including credit card info,and it was hacked ,you won't even need to be phished to get your CC info stolen.
not too long ago, according to google, china hacked a bunch of gmail accounts... they didn't need to be using anything with "windows" on it, all the data is stored online... china don't give a fuck what OS you were using.
www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/02/us-google-hacking-idUSTRE7506U320110602
you want a perfectly secure OS? disable everything on it that can access the internet. heck ,just unplug your modem or router ,or remove your wireless hardware. and don't let anyone use your computer. of course you'll still have to shred your trash... and not swipe your card at any store that looks even vaguely shady... or use any ATMs that have been tampered by fraudsters...you should get the idea by now.
you guys make it so hard for me to NOT be anal-retentive.
This is true. In fact, I found some vulnerabilities when we were evaluating our security situation that didn't involve Windows at all.
I must say, I was not uninstalling Windows 10 because of security issues. But Linux is certainly less of a target and is open-source, so that should help with security.
6 months ago, I was a self-declared M.S. fanboy. I still really like M.S. (company, not the disease). They do a lot of things right. And Win10 + XboxOne (which I hope to get in a year or two -- probably whenever I beat Witcher 2 :D) is a really awesome connection.
All that said, my old PC doesn't cope with Win10 at all. Since it aggressively downloaded and installed updates while I was attempting to use you PC, I no longer had access to my PC. *I* want to use my PC when I want to use my PC. I don't want Windows to use my PC when I want to use my PC. So that was it. I needed another option after that b/c I kept having to say "Sorry guys. Apparently I can't play tonight. Windows wants to do its thing." It happened once, then twice, then three times and then pretty much every time I wanted to play. I hoped it would be short-lived, but it wasn't. So that's it for me.
And now that I've made the switch, I love it. It was a few days of pain-in-the-butt hardships and took probably 10 hours to learn everything and get everything how I wanted it to just simply do anything. But once I was up to speed, now I can use my PC again. I can play every single game I was playing without any problems. And I can still access my email and pay my bills.
So Linux does 100% of everything I wanted Windows to do and none of the things that Windows was keeping me from doing. On top of that, it's free. So that's why I switched.