I have a windows box with spybot (something went screwy and it wont complete a search) adaware, symantec with most of the options disabled (I use it mostly to screen downloads) and I use opera for online sites I check often (forums, sites I should bookmark but don't, etc...) and firefox for general internet stuff. For e-mail I use thunderbird and while the junk filter only get about 25% of the spam it is easy to clean up the rest.

I tried linux but without good documentation I had a hard time getting it set up entirely. That and there was no good drivers for my video card (ati 9500 pro) when I was playing with it. I still want to build a beowulf cluster out of whatever spare computers I can get my hands on. Then I just need to find a program that will utilize a beowulf culster.

Just something to play with if you get board with windows is litestep. It is an explorer alternative. The shell can do anything explorer can and more, if you are confortable programming. It's kinda like linux, it is great, if you can manually set it up.

For the longest time I hated macs, in fact I have a old powermacII ram stick for the body of my keychain. But I have slowly realized that macs have their ups just like windows.