That Jeff (the situation, not your comment) really gets me angry. I have a product that works excellent and I may be forced to complicate my life and finances only because of the nature of that product and aholes who exploit it.
I don’t have time to spend hundreds of hours on getting a new operating system working and my many programs and data reloaded and working plus I have some old programs on the XP that also work great but will not probably not work on newer platforms.
You’re not alone.
I think I'm going to take all sensitive data off two of the three computers and use them solely for surfing the net while I'm watching movies.
Then, I'm going to order a budget Dell computer for $350 that has Windows 7 as its OS. Win 7 is good for another several years, in terms of MS support. After I reformat the fourth computer, I guess I'll give it to my mother in law who only uses a computer to play solitare.
“I have some old programs on the XP that also work great but will not probably not work on newer platforms.”
Try running them on Linux using Wine. Wine is a compatibility layer that lets some Windows software, especially older versions, run on Linux. Some software even works better on Wine/Linux than on Windows.
http://www.winehq.org/
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_%28software%29
Actually linux has better support for old Windows programs than Win7/8.