mike have you had any problems with the DMARK stuff yet?
The spam about XP is just a new line playing on peoples fears.
Most of us don't have the same feelings of doom about the XP compared to some admins.
Your teenage user of pirate torrents and porn sites running in admin account will be vastly more exposed to nasty's.
The biggest thing is ensuring that your running in a normal user account with your security settings requiring an admin password for any changes to the OS. A lot of home installations won't have this as Microsoft install defaults to setting up an admin account initially and a lot just keep running with this account.
Unless there is some over riding issue with not having XP you should get shot of it. To be honest the changes in hardware since XP machines were getting punted out is pretty vastly improved on several levels of hardware. Screens, processors, graphics and drives.
Windows 8 is a bit wank. Once you go to 8.1 and avoid having a Microsoft account and get used to it 8.1 seems to be ok to be honest. I don't have a touch screen or any of that nonsense.
I just got a new lappy for under 1000 UKP and stuck a SSd in it and the performance is quite honestly amazing so the niggles aren't that annoying compared to wanting to do something and it just doing it.
For a lot of folk it just breaking away from what they are used to which is the issue.