Taking the plunge...

[Cry Havoc]

i LOVE old games. but my love for old games goes farther back than yours even. like I love the old Apogee games, like Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Commander Keen, Major Stryker... I grew up on those. Thanks to DOSbox, I havent had a hard time playing them in Vista. In fact, I'm about to start a thread on them.

You lose points for not mentioning:

so is it possible I could see performance boosts out of both my computers that are running XP at the moment? What version of drivers would I use?

I think it depends on how well your XP build is running now. I think 7 will run at least as well as your XP model, and with a lot of good features. Plus, if you can backup your data, you'll be starting with a completely clean slate, which is always good.

I still have annoying problems with XP.

Here is the problem with microsoft. Their first iterations of the windows API were so crappy that they refuse to make the new ones backwards compatible.

In other words, I image that like vista, windows 7 will require you to bend-over backwards to install anything considered "old" now-a-days. As a pathetic example, I had an easier time getting diablo II to run on WINE under Linux than I did under vista. I can't even get games like sanitarium and master of orion 2 to install because microsoft's 16-bit emulation subsystem is a piece of total crap and I'm forced to use virtual PC with windows 98.

Couple this with the fact that movie and music companies bribed microsoft with money to include drm systems and I have an easier time running windows programs and burned movies under wine on ubuntu than on vista or sometimes XP!

I dunno if you live in the past like I do, but I would love you to see if old games (16-bit win 98 era) install and run on windows 7. If they don't, ill be using windows XP for a very long time.

You're in luck. You can run Windows XP in a virtual environment with Windows 7. You should be able to continue playing the games that you've got set up through XP with Win7. Yet another reason why Windows 7 seems like the first serious consumer OS from Microsoft in quite some time. XP was good, but 7 seems to be a fantastic OS.

[MannyIsGod]

Just installed it myself. So far so good I guess. Seems solid.

[leemajors]

two crashes in the last 24 hours. Nothing while actually using the computer, just coming back to it either off or unable to wake it from sleep.

[MannyIsGod]

Too many of my programs are running really buggy. I'm going back to XP Pro. I have a lot of programs that I use for work that come from individual programers so thats probabl why I can't do W7 yet, but it looks pretty nice.