let’s talk apples and oranges.
My Win7 pc has a dual 64bit proc and 4gb of RAM.
My Linux Mint (cinammon rebecca) has a single 64bit proc and 4gb of RAM, and it does circles around the windoze machine.
And never any maintenance required, i.e. defrag, c cleaner, malware etc. Linux Mint “Rebecca (17.1)” is THE sweetest OS I have ever used.
I agree, that is exactly what I am running on a dual core. I have a Win 7 partition that chokes this machine to a CRAWL.
Preachin' to the choir -- I'm a Linux/Unix user; CentOS is my workstation at work; OS X at home because then I have BSD Unix as well.
But be aware, this is not only a Windows issue. If you have Samba enabled on your system to support CIFS shares, that's SMB, and the same vuln is potentially present.
Mint is a cute little ubuntu distro. It does the job for your basic home office solutions.