Is Bitcoin really this safe with all this hacking going on?
I really need to know before I throw a ton of money towards it.
You have very little to worry about if you hold and keep the bitcoins on your harddrive and on a backup drive. Now when you choose to transfer your coins to an external source...that's when you're going to have to start worrying.
For any substantial amount, do NOT keep them on a hard drive or backup drive. Use cold storage, also see the links above (Armory etc).
Computers are not safe. Period. Windows in particular but Android, iOS, Mac OS X, Linus, OpenBSD, none are invulnerable and not something to rely upon.
Online wallets, exchanges etc are not good ideas either for substantial amounts.