Guess Gates has to maintain his place on the list of the worlds richest men somehow. Heaven forbid someone might use the same O/S on two different PCs in the same house! 
Try Linux, escape from the bull$hit. The distros are looking a lot better these days. I'll be trying a few over the next few weeks, will report back.
They've all come a long way, and the pace seems to be constantly accelerating. I run Redhat 9.0 both at home on a homebuilt Athlon XP box, and at work on a dual processor Intel Xeon workstation. We've also got (updated) versions of Redhat 7.x on most of our compute clusters at work. Personally, I'll probably switch to SuSE in April once Redhat drops errata support for RH9. I'd switch earlier, but I want to give the new 2.6 kernel a chance to become the default first. I might play with Fedora a bit first, but they still have some QA issues to deal with...
I haven't looked at it much lately, but Mandrake has a good reputation as a starter distro. If you just want a taste of Linux without modifying your existing system, grab a Knoppix CD. Just boot from the CD and you have an instant Linux system, and nothing gets written to your Windows harddrive (but make sure you have enough RAM). If you want to get really clever, get a USB pen drive and put your home directory (user accounts) on it... that way you can take your environment with you where ever you go and mount it in virtually any Linux system.
-Brian
