I too have an embroidery program that will only run on XP. I just bought an old laptop with XP on it for that express purpose. I'm guarding it so that I can use that program on it. It would cost me about $800. for the program now that would run on a newer version of computer. $125 bucks for an old laptop sounded like a bargain and it will hold me for awhile.
In the meantime, my laptop with win7 crashed. I now have Win8. Its not too bad, really. Just works more like your smart phone....lots of swiping, tapping and poking.
If you really don't want to go Win8...you can always go Apple....