If you buy a new car at your local dealer's, it comes with working brakes, good tyres, and a warranty. It works, as intended, "straight out of the box".

If you neglect its maintenance for an extended period, it can become unsafe.

When you buy a new computer it needs to come with a firewall, with antivirus, with secure OS, and WITH all the goddam patches rolled in and ready, rather than having to go through a ridiculous process of installing patches one-by-one in sequence, and adding band-aids to the system.

Now, I admit that XP is finally getting there - it has some reasonable anti-virus and firewall capabilities, but they are not well-understood by the average user and there are a load of machines out there using earlier OS versions that are not secure.

let's face it, there's a financial problem. here in Australia I can put together a functional PC for $700. The OS would set me back $400 for a CD whose manufacturing cost is around $1! Only when software costs get down to 10% of the hardware costs will people invest in new upgrades and authentic software all the time.

(And if you're reading this from Microsoft, YES I did pay full value for my latest OS on my latest computer, but a lot of people don't, as you well know).