Dick Splash Posted December 28, 2012 Share Posted December 28, 2012 I'm going to buy a new XP PC just for playing older games. It makes sense to me as there's too much conflict with my Vista and Win7 platforms, and looking for online fixes for these games gets old quick. The DX version seems to be a major issue. There are plenty of affordable systems out there, but I'd imagine I'd need XP with all SP's and updates along with sufficient hardware for speed and storage. Any advice on which Intel chip and which graphics card [The fastest that XP can handle] would be great. DS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky Posted December 28, 2012 Share Posted December 28, 2012 I built a PC for my nephew at Christmas. It was an AMD processor, with a HD7700 graphics card, massive thing with 2 fans onboard. I checked it's benchmarks and it is 4 times more powerful than my 8800GTS, and it was less than £100.Oh, and talking about PC gaming, everybody should at least scan this page. http://kotaku.com/5971153/ Word. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dannik Posted December 28, 2012 Share Posted December 28, 2012 Whatever you do, don't bother with the "XP Mode" that comes with moth flavours of Win 7. While it's actually using virtualization and runs fairly easily & well, it will not support some basic gaming functions. As for hardware, my missus recenttly obtained a new tower with an i3, 8GB of RAM, SSD, etc. and has been running a copy of XP Home we already owned, and other than the "32 bit OS can't see all the RAM" and the fact it's past the end of it's life cycle, XP has been flawless with little to no tweaking. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rocky Posted December 28, 2012 Share Posted December 28, 2012 I've never had any issues running any games in W7. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tinker Posted December 28, 2012 Share Posted December 28, 2012 I've never had any issues running any games in W7. Same here, not come across anything in the last few years that has not worked. Think I saw a topic about the first Rainbow Six game not working though, but have not tried that on W7. Had no other issues with the Tom Clancy games, full BF collection up to BF2142, few to mention, have a tonne of old games that have been played here on W7. I do still have an XP box that quite happily plays everything too. Basic quad core, 4GB Ram, GT430. If it is just for using older games, is it worth the £££? How much you want to spend? XP can handle the fastest chipset, and graphics card you can find, just like W7. Why not fit a new drive on your machine and install XP on there? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dannik Posted December 28, 2012 Share Posted December 28, 2012 I have Rainbow 6 up and running on Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, and it's nit giving me any trouble yet, though it was a slightly rebuilt (for XP compatibility) in a retail pack I purchased several years ago. Rogue Spear is also in that pack but won't load thanks to my AMD/ATI video card, which is apparently a known bug. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CR6 Posted December 30, 2012 Share Posted December 30, 2012 DS: Why don't you just buy an extra hard drive and pop it into one of your existing systems and install XP on your new drive. You can just change which HD the system starts with during boot up. I just did that this Christmas - bought an SSD and did a fresh install of Win7 on it. That same rig's original HD has triple booting with XP/Vista/Win7 on it, and I can boot into any of those old installs by changing HD boot preference in the BIOS at startup. Most current hardware still has XP drivers, so it whould not be a problem with any of your systems. That would save you a few bucks instead of buying a whole new rig/monitor/kb/mouse etc. Note that you can't install XP over Win7 and still be able to boot up into Win7. You would have to install XP first then Win7 after to get a dual booting HD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dick Splash Posted December 30, 2012 Author Share Posted December 30, 2012 DS: Why don't you just buy an extra hard drive and pop it into one of your existing systems and install XP on your new drive. You can just change which HD the system starts with during boot up.Thanks for the advice so far lads. I'd forgotten about the boot option. I've three physical HD's in the PC I want to use. The OS is on 'C' with an empty 'D' next to it. That's my partitioned drive. The 'E' and 'F' are the two other physical drives. So I could get a copy of XP and choose the 'D' drive for it? What about the drivers for the graphics card? CoD 2 looks and sounds brilliant, but then screen locks after about thirty seconds. This is why I've thought of having a dedicated XP PC again. It's an idea have had for ages and I was hoping Win7 would resolve things. DS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CR6 Posted January 9, 2013 Share Posted January 9, 2013 The OS is on 'C' with an empty 'D' next to it. That's my partitioned drive. The 'E' and 'F' are the two other physical drives. So I could get a copy of XP and choose the 'D' drive for it? What about the drivers for the graphics card? 1. Do NOT install Windows XP on the D: partition as you will lose whatever OS is on your C: partition forever 2. Do you have anything on your E or F drives? If it is just data, you can free up one physical drive by migrating that data from E or F to the D partition instead 3. Once you have a full physical drive (E or F - how big are they anyway?) then when you boot up your PC, log into the BIOS and make whatever physical drive you emptied out the initial boot drive, then do a fresh install Win XP on that one. To be absolutely safe, unplug the SATA/power connectors from your other 2 physical drives before you do the Win XP install 4. If you want to boot back into your C: drive, then you will have to change the BIOS default hard drive settings on startup. Most modern BIOSes have an option to pick which drive you want to boot from at startup even without logging into the BIOS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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