Windows XP going?

Lev, I came from a corporate It background and to be honest, apart from gamers, I can't think of many people who would even need , let alone utilise a machine, specced as highly as many of the plethora of cheap machines currently available on the market today. Even as a so-called 'power user' back in the days the main areas of concern to many like-minded users were stability, disk & memory size  - the operating system rarely came into the equationv except in two main areas. One, was the amount of memory, disk space etc it could deal with (more importantly this area was further limited by cost factors) and how quickly the machine could boot up. The latter was not helped by the increasing demands placed on the other components by the newer operating systems - TBH, it is only with the introduction of SSDs, for those that can afford them,  that the boot up process has become acceptably fast. 

How many times have you encountered some seemingly minor problem which took hours to deal with simply because the process to deal with it required identification (usually by trial and error or a process of elimination) that necessitated a re-boot every time a new option was tried, and each of these re-boots took four or five minutes, otr even longer? All th eother improvements are great - it's lovely to have terrabytes of storage but how often and how quickly can you back it up, and it's great to have 8 or 16Gb or RAM but how many people use a fraction of this available resource in everyday use? Graphics cards have seen amazing improvements in speed etc, but how often are you going to watch a full HD/1080p movie -  must of the stuff currently available to download (legally, that is) is limited to 720p/i and unless you have  fibre broadband or the equivalent you are severely limited by download time restraints. 

Overall, then, this is not a case for being a Luddite, rather more of a case of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. Sure the new OSs do add extra functionality and better user interfaces and the chance to make more resurces available to the system but if you are a normal end user you should be able to have the option to stick with an OS that meets your everyday needs but still have the seecurity blanket of this software actually being supported and twaeked as necessary to ensure stability and security are maintained. Remember, these bugs that are now surfacing were present when XP was released and Microsoft should have a duty of care to their end users - if a car manufacturer discovered a potentaially life endangering fault that only presented itself  after the production run was ended and after the car had done more than 100,000 miles do you think that they would simply say ' throw the car away and buy our new model'. Absolutely not - the reasons being that people expect their cars to do more than 100,00 miles nowadays and the fact that anyone injured in an accident resulting from a failure of a key component would sue the a*s* of the manufacturer.