Reason #4712 Why I Hate Windows

They've been doing this with some Windows SBS 2003 updates. 4 months ago we had to totally reconfigure the proxy server because the settings were gone. It took us quite a bit of time to trace it to the most recent update. Maybe if Microsoft would do a little better job of bug testing instead of pouring their time into making us believe the "newest version is better than the last version", things might be better.

This had been happening to me maybe a year ago. The last forced reboot ended up tossing some notes I had left open in a new Notepad window. Phone numbers, things I needed to remember for later, things like that. That was the last straw, and it was the last time my desktop PC was a dual-boot system. I backed everything up that I needed to save, reformatted the whole disk, and installed Ubuntu on it.

I was initially worried that I'd have difficulties with not being able to use some of the proprietary Windows-only programs I'd come to rely upon, but good alternatives combined with Wine for the absolute necessities completely eliminated the need for Windows. I'm a Web developer by trade, and so naturally I have to make sure my stylesheets and scripts work correctly in IE. IEs4Linux takes care of that. GnuCash is a decent finance manager, which replaced MS Money just fine for me.

Assuming you dual-boot, tell your bootloader to boot into your non-Windows system by default. That way, you have to deliberately choose to boot into Windows. KDE on Cygwin has also helped me adapt in the past. There's also Wubi or Debian-Installer Loader if you don't currently dual-boot, would like to, and don't want to repartition or add a new drive to your machine.