Sure. But still, so? How does it affect you if others have weak security?

Humm.. recently I dug up a pile of oldies and decided to give GSC Game World/Ubisoft's Alexander.
What a game it is!
Gonna test this beaut on wine soon, since there's no way in hell I'm gonna boot up my old xp pc now. Clunky as heck.
The dudes from CodeWeavers (Crossover) are up to the task, I suppose.
Check their progress on this blog post. Simply amazing!

I'm thrilled btw, since I now own 2 linux pcs at home ;P

I was mainly suggesting this both for browsing security and financial transactions. XP isn't updated after all anymore.

And as you said, "most" do run in Wine, not all, and when your game is among those who don't... Well, though luck buddy.

Botnets affect everybody. They are used for many types of DoS attacks.

Fair enough.

But the answer its not as straightforward as everyone should run the latest windows release is it. Lets exclude the data capture that M$ is doing on on win10 (and others). Advancement is great, however it brings its own problems. Security is also a difficult one to nail down, sure having up to date everything prevents a lot of problems, however the other way of looking at it is what would be more beneficial to attack, something locked up tight or something old and unprotected, called hide in plain sight. The best security you can do to your machine is to remove the internet cable, it would be very difficult to attack then, and that is what a lot of people have said, their xp machine is not networked. Me I find win 7 fine, but xp is also a good os, that when all is said and done, work.

And there's calling people retards that deliberately ignore something.
There's also ignoring strange demands - living on the edge, yk? ;)
Actually, people here suggested Win/Linux dual-boot, which wasn't part of the first post at all and may be unknown.
Since you're a DRM lover and probably still haven't bought anything here since people are still gifting you stuff - please go back to Steam.

At least after reading this thread you'd know, that most people using XP on the side don't go online with it at all and in most cases configured it for gaming and nothing else (without virus guard for better performance, etc...).
If my PC would have come with Win7 instead of XP, nothing would change for me, it would still be offline and only used for certain games.

I've been using Win7 Ultimate for years now, have a laptop with Win10 and it works like a charm.

Ha, actually checked and quite a few major departments are still using WinXP. I imagine though, cost is a big factor here. It would cost vast enterprises so much money and time to upgrade that it will still be going on in many years to come. My work only switched me over from XP to 7 some months back, and we are a tiny company. Remember that not all the people using them are techie, and there is a big switch between XP and 7, so training costs, application porting etc.

the pixies. head of the saintly monkey from the "monkey gone to heaven" single (front cover). i love their music and artworks as well

look whole picture http://quimby.gnus.org/4ad-pics/Pixies.MonkeyGoneToHeaven.ep.jpg

And here was me thinking it was a dog!

You do realise that "requiring less resources" is completely different from "using more resources if available", right? What good is huge amounts of RAM if it's not being used?

I don't claim that Windows 7 is more efficient on resources than Windows XP, but if more resources are available and you can get more done quicker if using more resources, you shouldn't conserve resources for conservation's sake (you should, of course, also release resources for more urgent tasks such as foreground applications).

The question is, how does it perform? Windows 7 caches a lot of data in RAM to (hopefully) speed things up, so would naturally use more RAM, but it frees that when it's needed for other things. In my experience on a PC with 512MB or 1GB of RAM Windows 7 works better, especially when coupled with ReadyBoost, a technology which isn't available in XP.