Is 7 fully compatible with xp?

Chances are they will, but then again, you may run into the occasional program that may not... why not setup a dual boot configuration to cover all of your bases though??

Evi said:

Tews said:

Chances are they will, but then again, you may run into the occasional program that may not... why not setup a dual boot configuration to cover all of your bases though??

Because that means lots of restarts...

Then you will probably be better off staying with XP...

Due to the major redesign of the Windows OS that occurred with Vista is is quite possible that "homebrew" applications designed for XP will need to be adjusted to work with windows 7. If all the correct programming procedures were taken for accessing low level parts of XP were taken then they should be OK with 7 but any short cuts taken by the developer will often result in incompatibilities.

the fact is that many programs that do not work with Vista or Windows 7 are still using programming calls and techniques which were replaced in windows NT but only enforced with Vista

One answer to this is the XP mode available in windows 7 Professional and above

So far, all of my old XP apps have worked in Windows 7. That said, there are always going to be some that depend on some internal XP feature that will not. (As Barman said)

I'd do what Tews recommended - set up to dual boot - and then try out the XP applications in Windows 7. In that way, if you come across something that is essential, you can re-boot into XP to run it until you find an updated version or substitute.

Once you have everything running, you can get rid of the dual boot.

Evi said:

Barman58 said:

Due to the major redesign of the Windows OS that occurred with Vista is is quite possible that "homebrew" applications designed for XP will need to be adjusted to work with windows 7. If all the correct programming procedures were taken for accessing low level parts of XP were taken then they should be OK with 7 but any short cuts taken by the developer will often result in incompatibilities.

the fact is that many programs that do not work with Vista or Windows 7 are still using programming calls and techniques which were replaced in windows NT but only enforced with Vista

One answer to this is the XP mode available in windows 7 Professional and above

So, basically, if it didn't run in Vista it won't run in 7, unless I use a compatibility mode which will most likely be slower than XP...
I guess I'll dualboot and only use 7 for dx10 games then (there's no way to get dx10 working in xp, is there?)

Not exactly - my personal experience is that the vast majority of programs written for XP will run on Windows 7 without any modification or need for running a compatibility mode.

Some programs however will have problems, caused in the majority by now unsupported programming practices.

If you have a lot of these programs then until the developers update the programs a dual boot would be the best practical option.

The fact that these programs have not been updated to run with vista may well mean that development has ceased and a search for an alternative would be the best long term alternative