Win7x64 Home Premium on an HP Pavilion DV7-4177nr notebook

I have a lot of older PC games that were bought during the XP era and was wondering if the only way to have them play properly is to upgrade to win7 pro or ultimate. I have gleaned that there is a partition thing one can do and dedicate an area on the HHD to XP but was warned if I am not an IT person that it is better to leave that alone and I am assuredly not an IT geek or whatever and to be honest I know enough to be dangerous, you know, the kind of person that needs a blow by blow in a nice and slow manner so it'll sink in. Picture in your mind and old Southerner that is on the brink of retirement(the 60's where real good to me if you get my meaning)

That being said I have also heard if you want to play games get a game player, but I have a lot of combat flight sims that I really like.

tazmo8448 said:

I have a lot of older PC games that were bought during the XP era and was wondering if the only way to have them play properly is to upgrade to win7 pro or ultimate. I have gleaned that there is a partition thing one can do and dedicate an area on the HHD to XP but was warned if I am not an IT person that it is better to leave that alone and I am assuredly not an IT geek or whatever and to be honest I know enough to be dangerous, you know, the kind of person that needs a blow by blow in a nice and slow manner so it'll sink in. Picture in your mind and old Southerner that is on the brink of retirement(the 60's where real good to me if you get my meaning)

That being said I have also heard if you want to play games get a game player, but I have a lot of combat flight sims that I really like.

Try bringing up Properties on the game executable ---> click on Compatibility tab and select Windows XP (SP3) or earlier. I won't get my hopes up getting it to work however.

You don't mention if you have XP or Win7 now, nor do your specs say. If you're asking about Pro or Ultimate because you want to try XP Mode to run your games (again, you don't say) then that might be an option. You can also dual boot using the tutorial Arc linked.

I did do all the compatability configurations to see if they would work properly, some did download others didn't and all did not perform properly. The system I have is in the header(win7x64 HomePremium) and as mentioned I was told by upgrading to win7 pro or win7 ultimate that it has a partition mode for xp so older data can be utilized. With that in mind and following the instructions above (that is a handfull) do I have to purchase a seperate xp disc to download or is that something that can be downloaded from the internet? It does seem like a mine field to try and negotiate with little room for error so....will doing the upgrade thing solve the issue of the xp question; in other words is it a fully functioning xp sp3 addition or just a patch thing to run old excel and word processors?