Following a series of failures and performance issues, a Microsoft spokesperson has admitted that the company cannot entirely rule out the possibility that their operating system might be evil.

Slapdash

"For some time we have attributed crashes, lost functionality, failures to load and so on as consequences of the slapdash approach to quality control that comes with being the market leader," said Harriet Bios at the company's headquarters yesterday. "But now we're starting to suspect that Windows has evolved some form of rudimentary consciousness, which is not altogether benign."

This is something that consumer organisations have been saying for some time, pointing to the software's uncanny ability to fail at the most inconvenient moment and the sheer cruelty of incorporating sophisticated backup and recovery systems which, as soon as you need them, you discover are switched off by default.

Malevolent

"What I find particularly malevolent," said Kieran Vorderman, feature writer for Creative Soldering magazine, "is the way that, when something goes wrong, the system will helpfully notify you that there is a problem then give absolutely no information about what the problem is nor what to do about it. Can there be any greater indication that what we are dealing with here is a sick, sick mind?"

Inevitably, Microsoft is trying to play down this issue and is instead focussing on the roll out of a new update to fix the problem.

"We're not going to automatically overwrite your operating system's moral compass," explained Ms Bios. "We believe that the choice is ultimately up to the user, and so the update will introduce the ability to toggle the malignancy settings. This way, users who prefer their PC to keep acting like a complete bastard will be unaffected."