[dynomight]

I got by using xp on a quite old machine from 2007 to 2015 by disabling updates and using a firewall. I think many will do similar things with windows 7.

Funny you mention pc-bsd. I lost the boot sector (perhaps) on my ssd in my win7 machine so this weekend I installed pc-bsd on the 'broken' ssd. During the install I was given a warning that something in my uefi was funny. Windows just failed to install with errors and no help to be found on the install cd (retail version).

So...I'm currently, as of 24 hours ago, using pc-bsd. I can't see most people going for it though. The kde desktop uninstalled itself randomly so I ended up installing gnome desktop and am using the classic version of gnome. It's going well now though. Actually really well, but I keep waiting for something bad to happen. If it behaves for a bit longer I might just switch.

There's an evil side to microsoft that I wouldn't miss but I do already miss liking microsoft. I've used them for a really long time. There's a lot of good design and engineering in there.