kingmohd84 wrote:thanks guys for the support
I will be running this on my macbook 2 ghz core2dou, 6gb RAM, and I believe geforce 9400m graphics card.
I thought XP was backward compatible with 95. I want to play game like Phantasmagoria for example and Deus Ex and the like. Theme Park is an old game that I want to run for a very long time now.
If XP is not backward compatible then I See no reason to buy it over Windows7.
I have the idea that Windows XP is rock solid, and Windows7 is not as much. Is this a false belief? because I keep wonderin why have many not upgraded to 7 and we are in its the end of its life time?
A lot of Win9X software does run on XP. It's still a very different core OS.
Windows originally ran on top of DOS. Prior to 95, mostly you just quit out of Windows to run games. It wasn't uncommon to make a boot disk to configure the memory differently. When Windows 95 rolled around, MS put more libraries n' things in Windows to help it do better with games. Still most games that saw dual releases (Mechwarrior 2 for example) still ran better in straight up DOS, even if they took some extra steps to run. Plenty of games that had been in development were still targeted for DOS. Basically to say, there was a transition period.
Windows 95 was still technically Windows on top of DOS. Just not really separable. As I mentioned, you could restarted in MS-DOS mode, which would just give you a basic DOS 7 shell. Windows NT is based on a different OS core. NT 4.0 adopted the Win95 shell, but they're hardly the same.
The basic problem a lot of PC software has is playing by the rules, partly because the rules are a moving target.
More or less, as time has gone on, programs have been given less and less direct access to the underlying OS and hardware. In general, that's a good thing. An application crashes, and it's less likely to take the whole system with it.
With regard to games, however, DOS programs tend to access hardware directly. You'd set up your hardware per game. With Win95, you started having system libraries to use instead, but the OS was lax enough that games could still often just run in a DOS box and still work.
NT actually set harder limits on what programs could do, and progressively has enforced other things too. 2000 added a lot of the DirectX compatibility, and basic stuff like USB support. XP was, initially, just a few more bells and whistles on top of that.
Still, at the heart of it, it doesn't have the same core OS, and has stricter enforcement of what a program is or isn't allowed to do.
Vista got a lot of its bad rap for actually trying to do the right thing, so to speak. A lot of issues people had with it were less to do with the OS, and more to do with that their programs weren't written to conform to spec for Windows, and XP (and prior) just let them get away with it. Plenty of apps, for example, assumed a user was an administrator.
After the service packs n' all, it's really not that bad, but a big part of that was also an adjustment on the developer side.
7 had the benefit of a much longer, and much more public beta. On top of that, it's less stringent out of the box than Vista was.
Most of the impression of XP as a stable OS is just age. It's been around for a while, many of us are/were used to it, quirks and all. 7 is likely to be in the same situation - it has been largely very well received, works nicely for lots of people, and Windows 8 is somewhat controversial thus far, meaning many businesses/etc will likely not jump on it. Not sure where you got the impression that people hadn't moved to 7, as quite a lot have, at least in terms of "current" users.
One of the things with Vista and 7 is that the 64-bit versions may have issues with particularly old software as they don't run 16-bit Windows software. The 32-bit versions of the OSes do.
