Windows XP or 7?

After some great advice from this forum to sort out a few problems with my hard drive, I'm now wondering about dual booting Windows on to my MBP.

I'm just looking for some advice and opinions on which one to go for and how to go about it.

All I want Windows for is to play a few old games that aren't available for OSX. Thing is these games range from being a few years old to being of 1996 vintage, so a Microsoft OS with good capability for this and a decent DOS is needed. I don't know a thing about Windows 7 but I read a few comments about quite a few games from the 2000/XP era not being compatible to run. Is this the case?

It was for this reason (and cheapness) that I decided to go with XP instead of 7, but I now read XP has a few issues of it's own when dual booting and updates/drivers are no longer available? If I were to opt with Windows 7, is there a way to give me a pretty good chance of being able to run games from DOS, 95, 98 and XP era?

Are there any other things to consider when doing this? And which is the best version to go for? I can get 7 Home for £125 but I don't know how restrictive it is. Also regarding XP, would an XP Pro disc that came with a Dell be ok to use or not?

Spec of the MBP is:
Mid 2009 running OSX Lion
2.26GHz Core 2 Duo
8GB Ram
750GB HDD (150GB used)

Thanks,
Oli

You can install either version of Windows on your Mac, however, since you stated that you would like to run some older games, XP is going to be the better choice. I had Windows 7 Home Premium installed on my MacBook for awhile but quickly found out I couldn't run any of my older 16 bit games from Windows 95, 98, or ME.

I no longer have Windows installed and instead use the latest version of WINE Bottler to run my old Windows games.

Thanks for that. I've now got Wine Bottler and so far it seems to do well at running games from Win98 onwards, but hasn't managed to run a more DOS based game yet.

I've also just got DOSBox and after a lot of playing around I've got one game running, but I can only have a tiny window for it, if I try to go to full screen it crashes. It also has the problem that most of the keyboard commands for DOSBox (i.e. Ctrl + F1 to quit) don't work.

Anyone got any experience with DOSBox on a Mac?

You might be better off using VMWare or Parallels to do what you want. Both will support anything from DOS to Win 8 at this point. I'm using XP in VMWare to play my old Win 95 and above games but I don't have any DOS games.