Dennis,
I hear you, it's not always easy to move over to the next version, especially not once the machine is fully configured and working well.
The problem with Vista however is that it went out of support last month, so holding on to it now is not making much sense unless you really must keep it running.
Putting it in a VM might be a good workaround, but I would suggest to not connect it to the internet anymore.
--
Wil