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Thread: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

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    Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    I made the leap to Vista (32-bit) a couple of years back for photo editing and other business work. It seemed very obvious to me to set-up a dual boot and keep using XP on another drive for my gaming (heck, the games ran visibly faster to me as well as every magazine espousing it).
    Now Windows 7 is out, I went and got a copy last week (for installing 64 bit version from scratch) and upped the memory to 8GB (all good for my photo editing)

    The question is, should I keep a dual boot with XP on the second drive for running games faster? Is there much differential between a 32-bit XP effectively running <4GB (i.e. less video card memory) and windows 7 64-bit running the full 8GB when I'm playing, say, Grid, Bioshock 2 or latest Total War?

    I'm moving off my prior Raid 0 setup so the XP and games will have to be re-loaded from scratch aswell - hence why I'd like to get people's advice before spending a lot of time on a second install.

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    Re: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    Speed wise I would think you're fine to move over to Win 7. I cant imagine they'll be any discernable difference in frame rates.

    If you're still playing older games then thats a different issue. Win 7 does have an XP compatability mode though...

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    Re: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    I play old XP games on Win 7. Just install them under the compatibility mode. Mind, the XP mode you can't really use for gaming anyway as its a rather crippled XP mode, plus xp mode only really comes on Win 7 professional or higher.

    Essentially if your game runs on XP it will run in 7 or atleast with with the compatibility mode If you use steam however, I would say the majority will run instantly I have Kingpin and Messiah on my pc from way back in 1999 and they run on Win 7

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    Re: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    Thanks for the thoughts. It's mainly games less than one year old that I'm playing. With them I was getting a better frame rate on XP than Vista (with same memory). Now with more available memory under W7 (but still curtailed under 32bit XP) thinking no point keeping the XP?

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    Re: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    Yeah bin the XP, Windows 7 is certainly a lot faster that Vista was for me on the game front, a few extra fps here and there, but then again my machine never had an issue with Vista in the 3 years I was using it

    If the games are around 1 - 2 years old they will work most likely on 7. Yet to find a game that doesn't work on 7 for me

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    Re: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    You'll have no problems running year old games on Windows 7!

    I had a few issues running Jedi Knight (1997) but got it working perfectly, so most old games are ok too.

    GTA 1 (also released 1997) is the only game I can't get to run on Vista and Windows 7 at the moment; I think that's down to an Nvidia driver bug.

    PK

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    Re: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    I couldn't get Theme Hospital to work properly. Not that that's particularly surprising.

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    Re: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    I think I have a copy of Theme Hospital somewhere.. I'll give it a bash tonight.

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    Re: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    I haven't had any issues moving from XP to Win7 as far as gaming is concerned.

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    Re: Do I still need a dual-boot XP for gaming if I've moved to Windows 7?

    Quote Originally Posted by Syllopsium View Post
    I think I have a copy of Theme Hospital somewhere.. I'll give it a bash tonight.
    I just bought it on the PS3 instead, save myself the hassle. The saving is a bit of a pain, and there's no music, but apart from that it's fine.

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