I'm thinking of getting Windows 7 professional...

[The Useless Member]

I was thinking about Windows XP. Now, I play a lot of older game, and I was wondering, if I ran those game in XP, would I experience less crashes/better performance while playing those old games?

[karamazovmm]

Err what are you trying to get?

[The Useless Member]

Err what are you trying to get?

??? I Currently have Windows 7 home premium.

[Jakethe_Snake15]

I believe he's saying he wants to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional, to get access to the built in XP Mode. I'm not sure if that will do what he's hoping it will do (ie, better compatibility for older games) but, hopefully someone will know exactly what XP Mode is, and what it will do for you.

[karamazovmm]

I believe he's saying he wants to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional, to get access to the built in XP Mode. I'm not sure if that will do what he's hoping it will do (ie, better compatibility for older games) but, hopefully someone will know exactly what XP Mode is, and what it will do for you.

ahhh thank you, as ron said, no it wont help.

You can take a look at using higher admin privilegies, i.e. go for the compatibility tab and chose run as admin, or run in compatibility mode for win XX.

There is also gog, I do have some games there and they update those to run modern OSes

[irishron]

The XP Mode built into Pro/Ultimate versions still will not do what many need. Try installing SimCity 4 in there. The installer won't even load. Medieval2 because of SecuROM will not install on a virtual machine, period.
If you're talking about my old Baseball For Windows, last update 1998, you have a chance.

[Hrothgar Óhreinsaður]

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit is great! It runs older games: StarCraft Brood War, and Diablo I & II: LoD were the only games requiring compatibility mode for me - just select Windows XP SP3 and click all the boxes in the Compatibility Tab - and it only costs $20 more than Home Premium. It's well worth the added power you get, not to mention the threshold for RAM in Win 7 Pro 64-bit is 192GB where Home Premium is 16GB: a well-spent $20! Take a look for yourself.

[karamazovmm]

seriously 192gb of ram doesnt matter at all. I have a server that I use that amount, its not running windows though

[Bolkonsky]

Find me an application that uses more than 4gb of RAM.

[Hrothgar Óhreinsaður]

I might be the odd-ball who buys something expensive to last for some years. That's why I mentioned the RAM capacities; Windows 7 Professional also offers more power to the user, if he wants to wield it.

There may be no current applications that use more than 4GB RAM, but that shall change. Is preparing for the future bad when purchasing an OS? Not if you don't have much money. For example, I ran Windows 2000 Professional from 2004 til 2009, when I began using Windows XP Professional through December 2011; I finally got Windows 7 Professional when I built a modern machine. A lot changed in that time span: I would have never thought 8GB RAM modules or 1TB HDDs would be available back in 2004.

[karamazovmm]

I might be the odd-ball who buys something expensive to last for some years. That's why I mentioned the RAM capacities; Windows 7 Professional also offers more power to the user, if he wants to wield it.

There may be no current applications that use more than 4GB RAM, but that shall change. Is preparing for the future bad when purchasing an OS? Not if you don't have much money. For example, I ran Windows 2000 Professional from 2004 til 2009, when I began using Windows XP Professional through December 2011; I finally got Windows 7 Professional when I built a modern machine. A lot changed in that time span: I would have never thought 8GB RAM modules or 1TB HDDs would be available back in 2004.

doesnt matter.

There are several reasons to that, here are a couple:

1) The transition to 64 bit apps aint complete and win 7 is going to be superseded this year.
2) Dealing with ancient OSes is a bad thing, there are so many leaks and holes that it will give you pause to use, specially that given the advances of internet and its content we are going to need more and more patches each day.
3) Even if you turn out to ''need'' more than 32gb of ram, it would be best if you buy a new pc altogether, it will take so many years for that need, that when you need it, ram would be the least of your problems.
4) OSes now are dealing differently in terms of how they manage memory, check out the ARS technica article about how windows 8 deals with memory, its quite technical, but a good read nonetheless.
5) We have reached a plateau in terms of what the user can do ''comfortably'', the main bottleneck in terms of what the system needs to be faster, is usually the HDD. Thats the slowest access time that we have right now, its actually so slow that the pc can do around 1 million cycles before the info that it requested from the HDD reaches it. So yes if you have ram enough (usually 4-8gb), buy a SSD.

[Bolkonsky]

Consoles aren't going to use more than 4gb of RAM, so no games will be using more than that. Besides, VRAM is the more important resource. In the future, we will probably do away with RAM altogether, as we come up with non-volatile types and faster SSDs.

[Crazyeyesreaper]

bah still fun to use ram drives and suspend them to SSD lol, ill gladly mess with a fake drive that offers Gb/s second for the lulz.

[karamazovmm]

bah still fun to use ram drives and suspend them to SSD lol, ill gladly mess with a fake drive that offers Gb/s second for the lulz.

I have done it, its crazy fun!

I have 256gb currently in the server that I use, just let the OS use 8gb and put all that to ram disk, sincerely in a dual socket mobo with 2 magny cours cpus, the thing flies.

Problem is to find mobos that are cheap or available for consumers to put that kind of ram, I know those exist, but they are usually very expensive.