peterferrie wrote:If you're still running XP, then don't let it connect to the internet. Time to upgrade.
Yeah, it's a good thing that Windows 7/8 are 100% backwards compatible with all software written for XP, and don't have any higher system requirements, so that every XP system can be seamlessly upgraded to Win7/8 and every single piece of software will continue to function flawlessly!
Bladeforce wrote:Take a leap of faith and try a linux distro with Wine if you like older games.
And if you like newer games too?
Bladeforce wrote:I am having plenty of success running many, many older games. If you use Office, look for alternatives. I haven't had Windows as my main OS for nearly 8 years now and enjoying every minute of it
You know what always turned me off from Linux? From time to time, I go looking for a program to perform some task and I usually stumble across at least one page devoted to a Linux program to do whatever it is that I'm looking to do. Invariably, the instructions for the Linux program tell you that you need to have at least two other support packages installed, then it's usually a 2-3 step process to accomplish whatever the task is, including complex command lines. I mean, look at the most popular video ripping and encoding programs like ffmeg and Mencoder. I'm sure they're powerful, but you have to spend an hour studying the docs to try and figure out what options to use. I occasionally use the Windows port of Mencoder to convert video to AVI format, but I have no idea what half the options do. I just copied a command string from a forum which seems to do the job and saved it in a BAT file. I'd actually like to change a few of the options, but the docs are so confusing I have no idea how to do it. I can change the simple stuff like cropping and scaling, but telling it to change the sample rate for the audio, convert to something other than AVI, etc, is beyond me. Sure, there are some frontends available, then you're back in the "you must have this, this and this installed to use that" territory.
As for XP being a risk; XP is 12 years old and they're still patching security holes. What does that say for the number of currently unknown security holes in Win7/8? Let's say that a typical release of Windows has maybe 500 critical security flaws over its lifetime. That means that Win7 has what, maybe 470 security holes that haven't been patched yet?
For what it's worth, I used Win98SE long after MS discontinued support for it and never had any major problems. I'm sure that people will say that it was probably part of a dozen botnets and running hundreds of pieces of malware, but I never saw any evidence of that.