I'm running 98SE and XP here, 98 being my primary system. With the unofficial upgrades from MSFN and a good stripping down with 98Lite, it's very reliable and runs everything I need, including Tor and VPC. The biggest issue is the browser. With Kex, the latest browsers that work reliably are SeaMonkey 2.0.14 and Palemoon 3.6.32. These do have problems rendering some sites, most of which I don't use anyway. If I really need to use such sites, I fire up VPC and use a virtual XP system.
XP Mode is a virtual machine for Windows 7 Pro and above. It's unnecessary if you have a working XP license, but VMware Player and Virtual PC works with it (not VirtualBox unfortunately). Make sure you have enough resources to run XP on top of 7. Yes, unless they're portable you'll need the installers and licenses.
I still use Xp Pro regularly. I'm using it now on a laptop that multiboots with Vista. It is a bit more tweakable than newer versions of Windows and I know it extremely well. It is installed on 7 of the 8 laptops I own. The newer ones have Vista or Windows 7 as well but I keep using Xp. I was using Windows NT4 for business until around 2004 and I'll keep using Xp as long as it does what I need it to do. I'm using Windows 98 too but just to run a print job. I'm printing plastic ID cards for a cash strapped organization I work for and I got a used thermal card printer for it that came with software from the 90s for Windows 98. I tried to set it up in a virtual machine but had parallel port driver issues and found an old Windows 98 laptop for a token sum just to print cards.
The last time i saw a computer running XP was like 5 years ago. (Not including PCs at work and a couple of those one laptop per child projects) In a more serious note, i think i will settle with W8 for now. It "feels" very smooth and it is indeed quite fast, as long as i have the desktop GUI im fine.
I'm still using Windows XP and even though support is ending I plan to continue to use it. Shadow Defender prevents anything digging it's teeth into my system that gets past Kerio Firewall 2.1.5. All internet facing apps are sandboxed. The system is fast, tweaked up just the way I like it. Won't change to another version until I need to upgrade to new hardware that doesn't have drivers that support WinXP.
One windows 7, three xp`s sp3 and two win 2k`s sp5. The older version of rising or kingsoft pc doctor would actually let you download xp updates directly from microsoft and so you could save them for a reinstall after 2014. Just a thought
My old Acer travelmate is not supported by Ubuntu :-( ( Cannot properly use fan , so temperature control is too complicated )
Dual boot XP plus Win 7 64 bit and now XP on VM. Because much of the genealogy software I use will not work on Win 7.
I'm still using XP but I see that "XP family" is veeery huge especially in China it's about 150 millions of users in one country -http://www.neowin.net/news/statcounter-windows-xp-is-the-most-used-os-in-eight-countries-including-china-
I run an XP virtual machine. Its mostly used as a test environment for different programs to run in. I actually am testing the Malwarebytes Rootkit beta in it right now.
I recently had three XP computers. I have scrapped out two and have one left in "mothballs". I now have three Win7 computers and am not overly excited over them either.
Yes, I have a Dell Dimension XP desktop that's running smoothly (after 12 years). It has a 1.8GHz P4 (x86), 1GB RAM and a 32MB video card (XP doesn't seem to need anything more)! Even the original 40GB (or there about) HDD is still in good shape, so I can't bring myself to 'retire it'.
Still have an old XP SP3 P4 that continues to run just fine. I'll keep Privatefirewall firmly in place on it, along with the best lite AV, and it should have many more years of useful life. p.s. I did create a dual-boot partition with Ubuntu with the understanding that once XP's support ended I'd simply transition to that Linux distro. But I still found myself in Windows better than 80% of the time although I like Ubuntu.