My Windows7 install is unstable and crashes constantly. My hardware passes all torture tests (memory, cpu, gpu, hard drive...), yet legally installed commercial software has become unregistered, requiring new activation codes. It's possible my machine got hacked. If so, the intruder is very slick. All of my mysterious, unexplained outbound traffic goes directly to Microsoft under the guise of crash reports. Should I should blame the NSA?

I can move back to my old WinXP machine or port all my custom web software to Linux. I think the Linux move is best, but will take more time. I should have some spare time to work on this issue tomorrow.

Ron