You know, they're still talking about this vulnerability affecting IE-6!
Dudes, if anyone is still using IE-6, they deserve whatever manner of ill fate which befalls them.
You say, (tearfully), "my bank account is empty, after browsing with IE-6"! I say, "you got what was coming to you"
I'm not entirely sure you even have to have an internet connection with IE-6. You might get infected simply trying to launch that turd.
Having used Win 8 since launch I can tell you that I have warmed to it and the last two major updates have made great strides in improving the desktop UI. Fact is that on desktop it is almost identical to Win 7. It is a very good OS which actually has LOWER hardware requirements than Win 7. Most who bash it have had little to no experience of using it. Btw, people who are home users with XP could try switching to Ubuntu/Lubuntu etc but having had first experience of putting it on several of my colleague's old laptops, it can be quite a dog if you're not very tech savvy.
I'm really tired of hearing, "how much better Windows 8 is, now that it looks and works like Windows 7". OTOH, that isn't as annoyingly stupid as, "you can buy add-ons to make Windows 8 look and work like Windows 7"
So I suppose we should all piss away at least a hundred bucks, to get a new OS which we should then retrofit, to make it work like the one we already have.
As far as the lower hardware requirements issue is concerned, face it, we all pretty much have more computing capability than we know what to do with. So, it follows logically that we can keep that hundred bucks in our pocket, and discount completely any capacity we're giving away by still using Windows 7.
When you come right down to it XP is the easiest to run, hardware wise, of the 4 latest M$ operating systems. In fact, it should be on a par with the latest versions of Ubuntu.
Windows XP was just too well designed. Yeah, that's right, and that's why so many people are still using it. The only really salient feature worth upgrading to Vista or Win 7, (at the time of their release), was the native SATA, or if you prefer, AHCI drivers, included with those 2 OS.
A lot of this is all really tedious. More often than not, these discussions devolve into a bunch of autocrats, talking down to XP users because they aren't brainwashed sufficiently, to start trumpeting the virtues of Windows 8, from atop the M$ bandwagon.