Face it, MS products suck ass, but we are stuck with them because they are the most widely used.
You are stuck with nothing. Feel free to use Ubuntu or Mac. I promise you, neither of those are going to help you if you don't know how to protect yourself, though.
Virus or not, my experience with Windoze users makes me glad I have a MAC. A friend this week asked my help with his XP OS when he bought a new larger HD and tried to clone his old smaller C Drive to the new one and expand the partition to the new size. It would no longer boot up. After several weekends of trying in vain, he asked my help because Best Buy, where he bought the new HD, wanted to charge him $200 to fix it. I went on line for tips and tried restoring the Master Boot Record and tried restoring the partition boot sector but neither helped.
I figured out a work around by having him boot from a CD with an image of a bootable floppy and then doing a restart. He then has all his old settings and system. But if he shuts down rather than restarts, and he then boots without the floppy image he gets a "boot disk failure" message. He's facing doing a complete install from scratch and then updating with all the service packs and loosing all his old settings if he wants to boot from the HD.
On the MAC there is a free cloning program called SuperDuper that clones your HD, expands the partition, and makes the drive bootable in one easy click of the mouse. I've used it many times on my computers and on my friends without ever having a problem.
MACs will spoil you.