I've been testing the Win7 RC at home for a few months now on a five year old PC. My focus thus far has been on determining how well my oldest software and hardware can run on the new OS.
Basically, I think users of XP who plan to upgrade their old PCs to 7 and have old hardware that depend on included software for critical added functionality should proceed with caution, if at all. I encoutered issues where the accompanying software that came with the old hardware was unable to recognize and use the driver that Win7 had provided automatically.
The worst case was with the Audigy card that I had installed in the PC. Win7 installed a driver automatically but when I installed the software suite that the card came with and then tried to run it with the Win7 driver, it failed to recognize the device. I then tried to upgrade the software to the Vista-compatible version and Win7 crashed and subsequently refused to boot. I had to use a restore point to get Windows working again. So basically the card is installed, but without the additional card software, it can't be configured to take full advantage of the 5.1 surround sound speaker setup that's connected to the PC. I do get 5.1 surround sound with DVD movies played in WMP, but sound playback is otherwise limited to a 2.1 speaker configuration with no crossover, DSP effects processing, equilizers, 3D balance etc as those are provided by the additional software that refuses to work with 7.
If you've got old PC hardware whose accompanying software is not currently being updated by the developer to support the Win7 platform, you'll get the best use of your hardware if you stick with XP until you're ready to dump the old PC and buy or build a new one.
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