<sarcasm> I'm not worried. I only use XP for banking, Facebook and online purchases. </sarcasm>

I think the only XP systems I have left now are in VMs .... 2 or 3 of those.

Hardware systems are 3 x 7s and one dog of an 8.1 on a laptop....

Same here. I have a few programs that refuse to run in an OS other than XP.

Besides, thanks to DRM, it's the last OS that allows you to record "What You Hear".

I've never had a worry with recording anything I wanted on Vista, Win 7 or Win 8... but then I don't purchase/download digital music since I have everything I like/want on CD and can just rip whatever to my music folder.... and I could never understand anyone buying music from fechen iTunes, with all its DRM and restrictions.  For mine, it's raylight dobbery... and just for a license to play it, they say.  At least when I come out of the record store I own the CD I just purchased.  Yeah, Apple, that's something else you can stick in your bronzed ginger.

I know, didn't make alot of sense to me, either, but don't worry, I'm having a bad hair day and hopefully tomorrow is a better day

Not so fast...

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/not-dead-yet-dutch-british-governments-pay-to-keep-windows-xp-alive/

What dipshits, paying MS to extend support on a butt ugly, obsolete OS that should have drawn its last breath about 10 years ago.  For the price they're paying to extend support for XP, they could replace every XP rig in their possession and have change left over.

Nah, they're not dipshits... they're fechen effwits.

Upgrade to Lubuntu, no more fees, you can keep your old hardware since it's not as demanding as modern bloatware (no HW accelerated GUI shiny chrome, etc.) You could probably run the critical XP software in Wine, many applications work, including games. Stable, regularly updated, secure, and most importantly FREE operation system. 

I've not tried Lubuntu as yet.  So, is it different to Ubuntu, and if so, how?  I've known about running Windows software in Linux using Wine, and RoboLinux makes it even easier, so I have no objection to running one or more Linux distros on my XP rig when it's up and running.  And I came a step closer to that last night with the freeing up of a 8800GTX graphics card

Lubuntu is Ubuntu with LXDE as a desktop environment. Light on resources.

Thanks for that, I shall look into it later to check out my best options.