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Win7 or whatever OS you chose will have the same chance to get exploited/infected as XP or any other unpatched OS. It's the procedure of the tech that matters and not the OS
I agree with most that Spildit says.
A little storyAs you know, banks always their customers they should use the latest version of Windows or Mac OS on their PC to use their e-banking systems. At the time where Windows 7 was already the most popular OS, and Windows 8 had maybe already been released, I went to an ATM to withdraw some money.
A technician was taking care of the machine, which was rebooting. And guess what: I saw Window's XP logo showing. The ATM was thus of a major financial institution in Switzerland, not a small provincial bank.
I don't know if they use a physically separate network than Internet, but I think it would cost a lot. Hence, I assume a VPN or so.
Of course more recent versions of Windows will have security patches that were absent from older versions, but if Windows XP had been so insecure, the ATM wouldn't probably have stay with it so long.
Don't forget that scaring people with the theorical lack of security of old versions helps selling the new ones ...
Every software that you put in your OS represents a risk, either close source or open source.
Open source should in theory be more secure, but the truth is that 99,999% of us don't have the time to check and understand the code of open source softwares and to compile them. Most softwares have become complex and rely on other components.
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I'm running XP here on all my machines without any AV or anti-malware protection and i have never got a single infection on any of those machines.
I also still use several XP computers and agree with Spildit.
From my experience the most infected PCs that I have seen were those with the most antiviruses and antimalwares installed, whichevery they were with Windows 7, Windows 8, a.s.o.
However, it would probably be wiser to say "any
visible single infection", as I believe that the most and the most pernicious infections are probably invisible to the end user.