... you're about 4-5 years late.

Add the cost of re-training, software compatibility testing, a pilot program, etc. and those costs will blow out MASSIVELY.

Anyone in IT worth their salt knows that the software license cost is a tiny part of the TCO or cost to change. There are huge amounts of other costs involved and they are really hard to calculate. Switching platforms is a risk. Switching from XP to say, 7 is a big enough risk with big enough costs and there's a high level of application compatibility there. Switching to ChromeOS? Lol. Even if the software and hardware was FREE, it would still cost money. A lot. A very difficult to calculate number. Business decision makers do not like large, difficult to calculate $ values for risk. With good reason: being able to budget effectively goes out the window.

No, but XP isn't a hammer. It's a much more complicated piece of equipment than that. To use a workshop analogy - it's say, a bandsaw or hydraulic press that no longer meets any current safety standards. It is end of life and either needs to have safeguards installed (in XP's case, isolation from the internet and the rest of your production network) or be replaced.

Also... it is a cost of doing business. We all have the same issues. If you're not going to be bloody careful to isolate it, you are running the gauntlet and need to do a risk assessment and come up with a contingency plan for when it all goes pear shaped. Once you've done the risk assessment, you make the call on what to do. That may be upgrade, it may be isolate until the equipment goes end of life.

Sitting on your hands and whining "waaah it is too expensive" is a cop out - not an action plan. You need an action plan.

You isolate it from the general users production network and the internet and move on. From the sounds of it, that device should be running an embedded OS and should be treated as such.

You no longer have support for bugs, etc. deal with it.

However, you have had better learn for next time that when you purchase a device worth 100k pounds there sure as shit better be some sort of support contract in place. Or you're going to end up in the same situation next time.

Correct. I'm in Australia. It's standard.

Because 2 TB hard drives are about 130 dollars.

Because that's where his friends are, drinking beer.

IE9 onwards is an entirely different beast to previous versions. If you haven't used IE since version 9 came out, it is worth at least testing (if you're on windows at least). There isn't really a major browser out there at the moment which doesn't suck in various ways, but in terms of suckage recent versions of IE aren't actually bad.

Not only that, but IE4 (yes version 4) performed faster in the real world than Netscape at the time. IE6 came way later, the game was well and truly over by the time IE5 came out.

... that open source is superior. owait...

Signed packages are a bit different to checking code signatures on executables/scripts at run time.

HP elitebook 8570 with AMD video, latest available driver from HP, plugged into an HP 1920x1080 display. Laptop has 1920x1080 display option.

You mean like Windows explorer, Office 2013, internet explorer and the Windows 2012R2 RSAT? It's a joke. And yes I've tried all of the things you mention. Windows 7 just leaves the scale the fuck alone and it works.

Pretty much.