UAC can be set to always automatically elevate without any prompt even in Win10 (disabling UAC completely would kill Metro apps). I prefer the "Always Prompt" c

UAC can be set to always automatically elevate without any prompt even in Win10 (disabling UAC completely would kill Metro apps). I prefer the "Always Prompt" configuration myself and it is unfortunate it was ignored when Win8's task manager was designed for example. Win9x was not affected by the WMF SetAbortProc escape problem at all unless you are printing (I think the escapes were simply ignored). Linux is better on older machines because it gets security updates and has ASLR and other exploit mitigations etc (though not all are useful without NX) and it happened to be free.