Should I upgrade my IE 7?

I'd do the upgrade. It's pretty easy to do, you just run Windows Update and let it do the install. IE9 by itself can 30 min. to maybe an hour, but it's all automatic. There're two good other browsers you can use that you can use, Firefox which can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org and Chrome that you can download from http://www.google.com/chrome .

Good luck.

Absolutely. When Microsoft effectively killed off the competition in Netscape at the height of its anticompetitive days, it just left IE6 to rot in the sun. In order to drive Netscape out, Microsoft poured millions of dollars into development, and focused almost exclusively on features, security being a distant afterthought. So for a couple of years, there was literally a situation where you would have 1-2 (or more) major security vulnerabilities in IE6 being discovered EVERY WEEK.

Finally, when Mozilla came around and started presenting a little competition again, Microsoft decided to revive development on IE again, and part of what they have been doing is trying to improve the security of the browser. So credit where credit is due, even if it's not really saying much to say that security in IE has improved with every version.

You would honestly be better served finding an alternative to IE. You can take your pick between Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. They're all free, and all much safer, on the whole, compared to IE. It doesn't give you a black check to go doing whatever you want on the Internet, but it's a good start.