well, you just wrote that a not-up-to-date system is unsafe and then you wrote that you disable the automatic updates, so what is wrong with using windows XP, if your windows 7 or 8 is not safe either? :-)

also about the productivity part: most of IT people know absolutely nothing about productivity and UX - businesses lose a LOT of manhours since you often provide crappy setup machines for your coroprate drones - there is a very big chance that this account or marketing person does not know how to setup their taskbar in order to make it look the same way as in windows XP, what is strictly more productive.

the reality is that your computer might get infected with any system, but if you are using it in a smart way there is not a big difference between XP or 7 or 8 in terms of safety; but there is a big difference when it comes to productivity

the win 8 interface sucks so much that even MS partially got rid of it with win 8.1

so please do not write that I need to throw one of my computers into trash, just because it runs windows XP - you know what? it works perfectly - and has been working perfectly for last few years - I can even run HS on it without a problem - and it would struggle to run with anything else with XP, since it simply does not have up-to-date hardware - and we did not even touch the productivity part here, XP has a much better user interface when newer versions; you can setup windows 7 so that it "sort of" works like XP, but it is still not the same (win 8 is just an abomination)

(and please do not tell me that you can install classic shell - since it just shows that win 7/8 have crappy interface in the first place)