This question is right up my ally [
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I repair PC’s for a living and have been a beta tester of Win7 a while now, hopefully I can shed a little more light.
Win7 has some nice new bling,
Underneath the bling Microsoft have changed the core of windows making it handle multi CPU’s and memory better. It should also be pointed out that Win7 boots noticeably quicker than XP and Vista. There are a lot of sluggish laptops out there running Vista, a clean install of Win7 would sort most of them out, as would reverting to XP.
XP 32 or 64bit can handle Quad core CPUs just fine but Win7 is a bit better at doing it. Spreading the load between the CPU’s.
Will Win7 run all your old and new programs that worked in XP,,? hmmmm well it might but there is a good chance you are going to need to spend some time getting some of them to install correct or run correct.
Will it run your programs faster? Some yes some no, on an older PC with a single CPU probably mostly no.
Then there’s drivers, older hardware could be a problem.
GT40:
I would stick with good old XP on your rig, you know all its little quirks by now and have become used to it, if you go down the Win7 rout your going to open a whole new can of quirks and on your PC this might be for very little potential benefit. From your post you don’t sound like you are really interested in what it looks like.
A lot of Hardcore XP users, I’m coming round to thinking I’m one of them, I have a feeling are going to stick with XP.
You know I have Win7 and XP on my PC (quad core), and right now im in XP, its my solid work horse, I go to Win7 for a play now and then and to use its media center which is better than XP’s or Vista’s media center.
I personally can’t decide either … LOL
XP is so solid; my mind goes back to Windows 95, 98. ME, most people moved to XP to get away from them in the hope of an OS that would be reliable. XP users I feel have a smooth ride now and don’t want to risk the bumps and why should we [8D]