Linux is almost universally considered to be significantly more secure than any version of Windows. I mean there are dozens if not hundreds of examples of why this is so. Some believe OpenBSD is more or less the "most" secure commonly available OS, but I've never tried it and it always seemed like overkill to me... too few people use it -- compatibility problems all over the place, even though it's very similar to Linux. Anyway, it's an option. I consider it a pointless one, but your mileage may vary & all that.If you want to make sure nobody can ever find evidence of your Silk Road activity, you need to encrypt your entire hard drive with TrueCrypt -- not just have a hidden encrypted volume -- and never plug your USB key in to your Windows machine. That's what Astor has said, at least. Frankly I've never played with TrueCrypt: I don't vend and there's no reason for anybody to bother with real disk forensics on any machine of mine, so I don't really find it all that interesting...It does require some... configuration, so to speak. I mean if you've never used Linux, you're going to want to try using it a bit before you jump in to full disk encryption, etc..