As of now, Windows XP is the default option if you are a gamer, even though it doesn’t have the flashy DirectX 10 which Vista has. The main reason for this is that many of the older games don’t / work / in Vista.

It even led to many Vista vs XP / discussions by gamers. But Windows 7 won’t throw up any such challenges. According to Within Windows, Windows 7 will come with an XP mode, which will basically run XP virtually within Win7. As far as I know, you need a lot of RAM to run games within an operating system. But hey, most of those old game run pretty well with just a 1Gig RAM kept aside, so that shouldn’t be such an issue.

This screenshot shows XP mode. The word file in the background doesn’t have the ribbon system which came out in Word 2007.

Also, there won’t be any “My printer won’t work with Win7” stories, which was quite common after Vista’s release.

Another thing I liked is that you don’t necessarily need to have an XP CD with you to run this. You can download it as a Windows update once you have Win7 installed. No money paid. Awesome!