While I've asked here about Win 7 Pro, that's for a commercial office which needs MS compatibility.... For my own use, I mostly switched to Linux Mint (Mate) a few months ago. Mint is fine for me, but I'm not sure that Little Old Ladies [LOL] could adapt.
I've put a Mint machine in a public-use location mostly used by such LOLs. The desktop has Icons for Firefox browser, four of their browser-based email programs, three Solitaire programs (including Spider), Google Earth, Picasa, LibreOffice writer and spreadsheet, etc. I've received zero reaction and there are indications that it has at least been tried.
I'm sticking with Mint 13 LTS (Long Term Support) until the next LTS version (17?) comes out. I find that even Mint 16 doesn't have an "approved" driver for a very recent Brother laser printer.
Please don't bite my head off, but the Office which will get the Win 7 Pro is going to keep an off-line XP for some of its vital software that doesn't have a newer version and is far too hard to rewrite (people have tried and failed). As an alternative, I have the ancient software running under DOSbox on Win 7 and Linux Mint, but ordinary DOSbox can't directly write to a printer.