While I am retired and so do not have commercial pressures I still have the problem. Several programs I use frequently do not work on Win 7 or 8. It is not the cost of upgrading that stops me, It is that the "upgrade" programs are vastly inferior. In particular I have JASC Paintshop Pro 9 which fits my needs ideally. Corel Paintshop Pro X which works on Win 7 I regard as unusable. When Corel took over JASC they imposed their practices on PsP and ruined it. I have a legacy of documents from Lotus Smartsuite which I still want. While MS Office can do marvellous things I do not need, it is very difficult to do some items that are easy in Smartsuite. I have just bought a PC with Win 8 pro so that I can keep on using Win XP when my old PC dies.