yeah i love win7 alot but ive seen a lot of incompatabiilities with older games and emulaotors as well

the main thing i would look out for though is that it doenst support unsigned drivers with out you chosing a option at boot it will just bsod other wise or somthing to that extent

sys dirs are very different and yeah it will have trouble finding this exspecially with older applications

in my opinion there really is no reason to upgrade from xp to windows 7 Xp still runs a bit smother and has a ton less nusances than 7 but there both good

if i think of any thing else ill let you know

What is this about driver support? I use some third-party drivers - mainly for my graphics card. Will I be able to enable third-party driver support at all?

Much of my hardware consists of legacy devices. (at least, I'm sure Windows 7 would consider them legacy) I'm still using an AGP graphics card, in fact. I'm not sure if Windows 7's default drive database will support some of these devices.

XP has been a good system. I don't have any major arguments with it; but I do think 7 is going to address some of the nitpicks I have with XP and earlier systems. For one, I just don't feel I can do much more to tweak XP out. I still feel there are a lot of shortcomings with XP's version of Explorer. There are a number of things you either have to hack with a resource editor, or have to go through convoluted registry settings just to change. I've actually noticed some quirks in Explorer. (possibly bugs) The desktop margin screws itself up from time to time if you use one or more custom bars along with the default taskbar. i.e., can't have a bar mounted to the top of the desktop, because programs will sometimes ignore its margin, or their control bars will appear underneath it in windowed mode. It's a bit difficult to explain. I think Windows 7 removed the ability to even mount your own bars in other parts of the desktop margin - possibly because it was so broken to begin with. Explorer (in XP) also completely disregards my folder view settings from time to time. After hours of configuring every folder view, the system just decides to erase all my settings one day.

I've messed with 7 on some other systems, but haven't installed it on my own before. I did like Explorer's features and customization. I also liked the fact that nothing in the system looked like it still belonged to the DOS era. XP is bad for that.

I don't like the fact Windows 7 doesn't work with older cards as Linux does. For example, my nVIDIA GeForce MX card doesn't work well, even with the old nVIDIA XP driver (maybe because it doesn't support a recent DirectX version), it BSoD everytime I want to use the GPU. (i.e. launch a game = BSoD), unlike Linux, who is very happy with that hardware and use them to their maximal capacity, which Windows failed to do. I think Micro$oft made Windows to make people buy new (and expensive?) hardware on each new release, and that make people get pissed and make them stick with XP. Meanwhile, M$ and others hardware companies makes lots of profit using that strategy.

Anyway, I didn't wanted to hurt Microsoft and others with this post, Windows is an awesome system (when it works well). The problem is that too much people complains that it doesn't work. (Especially with legacy devices.) Therefore, Windows is bad. Unless you have the most awesome hardware ever, which will become obsolete in 3 years or so if you use Windows.

Driver signing is only required on 64-bit, and can be permanently turned off.

Check http://www.killertechtips.com/2009/05/06/disable-driver-signing-in-windows-7-using-group-policy-editor/
for how to disable.

I'll be using the 32-bit version. My CPU is 64-bit, but it's backwards compatible with 32-bit architecture. I just think it's less hassle to go ahead and use a 32-bit OS. I really don't even understand what sort of practical advantage there would be to a 64-bit system. I don't think I'm going to have 16 GB of memory anytime soon, simulate particle physics or make any attempt to brute-force encryptions. 32-bit instruction sets are fine for now.

As for MS and hardware support - I don't think older cards are generally well-supported because Windows 7 is pretty robust. The newer versions of Direct3D, for instance, aren't going to get much performance out of AGP devices. It wouldn't make sense to include official support for these devices, when they're likely to buckle under the stress of robust software libraries like D3D. I could understand why they would just leave it out altogether.

The version of 7 that I'm installing was slipstreamed so I could strip-out components like the Visual Styles. My card just isn't going to support all the graphical frills. I'm only concerned about getting games and emulators to work, along with third-party card drivers.

Well, at the moment I would highly recommend the Windows 7 32bit, since I used it for a long period of time on my Laptop (which was manufactured 2009) and had no Problems with it. (I never needed more than 3.25 Gigs of RAM btw)

Quite the opposite: e.g. my internal subwoofer works properly on win7 only. On XP, the subwoofer is either quiet, or buzzes something that doesn't match to the sound of the speakers. The curious thing about that Problem is: it only occures when playing Windows-Sounds, so I ended up with disabling the Windows-Sounds on XP. Secondly, any game I use that runs on XP, runs on Windows 7, too. The games that don't work anymore on XP (because of the Hardware, which is quite up to date), don't work on Win7 as well. (e.g. Dungeon Keeper 2, Cossacks)

Oh and you should take this into consideration: Windows XP Mode Download

lolje

Ouch the first thing happened with my ATI Radeon 9250+ video card 4 years ago , I had to setup a 2nd monitor and use it a primary display, but again, I had an impossible to remove integrated card as well. Nevertheless it sucked :S

I never heard of Arora before. I've been using Opera for a while and am kinda confortable with it. It seems to get later and later in web standards, tho (mainly rounded edges in CSS)