XP or Vista (for games, particularly old ones)

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I am thinking of installing either XP or Vista on my new iMac (not the ones just recently released, but a 2.8 ghz processor, 4 GB memory, 1 TB hard drive) and I was wondering which would be best for me.

I will be using it primarily for games (in fact, I can't think of anything else that I would need it for), but most of the games I play are fairly old. I'm talking things like Fallout, Baldur's Gate 1 + 2, Planescape, Darklands, etc. Some of the games I might like to play were released before 1997 and may require DOSBox to run them. Some of these games might be difficult to run on XP, so I was worried that they might not run on Vista at all.

I do play newer games like Half-Life 2, Oblivion, and Civilization IV occasionally, but I probably play more old games than I play newer ones. I'm not actually much of a gamer anymore, really.

I may also use VMWare Fusion from time to time. I figure it would be alright if the games are older?
 
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tux08902

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For older games Parallels and VMWare Fusions should be fine. Parallels supports OpenGl and DirectX 8.1, so you might want to look into that, although I hear that performance is still lackluster. I installed Windows Vista Basic on my MacBook Pro on a 30GB partition just for Counter-Strike Source, Day of Defeat Source, and Team Fortress 2. Those are the only games I play right now. Also, StarCraft is natively available for OS X, so that works out great.
 
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For older games Parallels and VMWare Fusions should be fine. Parallels supports OpenGl and DirectX 8.1, so you might want to look into that, although I hear that performance is still lackluster. I installed Windows Vista Basic on my MacBook Pro on a 30GB partition just for Counter-Strike Source, Day of Defeat Source, and Team Fortress 2. Those are the only games I play right now. Also, StarCraft is natively available for OS X, so that works out great.

Yes, but does Windows Vista run older games very well? That's kind of what I'm getting at here. For example, I'd like to play Grim Fandango on my iMac, and it can be enormously difficult to get that game to work on XP. I'm worried that some really, really, really old games that work with difficulty and effort on XP might not work at all on Vista.
 

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Yes, but does Windows Vista run older games very well? That's kind of what I'm getting at here. For example, I'd like to play Grim Fandango on my iMac, and it can be enormously difficult to get that game to work on XP. I'm worried that some really, really, really old games that work with difficulty and effort on XP might not work at all on Vista.

No, Vista is very well known for being incompatible with older software (of any kind). In fact, on my desktop PC, I just had to plunk down $79 for a copy of Photoshop Elements for Windows since my old version 3.0 was known to be incompatible. I know it's not a game, but mine is not the only incompatibility story I've heard.

Stick with XP unless there's some feature you need in Vista... JMO.
 

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