Hoping to make your life's design a bit more dynamic!

My personal recommendation is you wait at least a year after Windows 7 spreads itself ammong users before migrating.
Research, research and research some more, then form your own opinion.
Microsoft thought of dropping the support for XP when Vista came about...
heh you saw what happened, instead they had to release SP3 to keep XP moving along further.

Generally, you shouldn't see problems moving from Vista to WIndows 7. Its the same kernel that has just been reworked to fix many Vista issues and then streamlined. (contrary to a lot of reports that it was rebuilt from the ground up.) Because the main kernel didn't change, there shouldn't be the issues you saw between XP and Vista incompatibility. Think of Windows 7 more as Vista 2.0 (Which Microsoft might have called it if Vista wasn't such a dismal black eye for the company.)

Doesn't surprise me that Microsoft wouldn't attempt to write an all new OS instead of revamping an existing one;
makes perfect sense if you think about it, as developing an OS from the ground up, even if you use bits and pieces of
existing source code, would take quite a while to accomplish.
I can only hope Windows 7 isn't just Vista with a fresher label, cause if that's the case, Microsoft had better start slapping up
SP4 for XP hahah.

Supposedly the code was stripped to the essentials for the kernel and rebuilt from that point up. All of the crap like hardware polling and such was scrapped and rewritten. All the security update crap too. Everything that was an issue with Vista was flat out scrapped and rewritten from scratch (according to reports). We can only hope they weren't as stupid with a second chance at it as the first time though.

Personally, some of the crap should have just been scrapped in my opinion. Hardware polling for example, was a ridiculous concept in the first place that can only cause issues no matter how well written it is. So until they decide to quit trying to make sure they can squeeze every penny with these new OS'es. I'll stick to XP. (Not that they aren't trying with it)

But does anyone know how the XP environment inside of the top two premium Win7s will work? Will it be totally XP-like and compatible with everything including end user-written programs (i. e. ROM inserters) or a stripped down XP-like version that will just run old office ( Microsoft commercial programs for businesses) software and such?

I will need to learn Win7 to take care of all the computers I take care of for people, and I will run an "experimental" workstation of my own loaded with Win7, but I will stick to XP for personal use such as hobby work for as long as possible, same as I did with Win98 once. I hope we do have an XP-SP4. MS has continued supporting that antiquated Win2000 all these years - for business.

It definitely will not work with all Windows XP stuff. Even with an "XP Emulator". Anything that didn't work with Vista will mostly not work with Windows 7. (In fact, so far I've not heard of much if any of the software that was fixed in Windows 7 that didn't work in Vista.) The Vista Kernel was an entirely new Kernel. It was not based on XP. But since the Windows 7 Kernel is based on the Vista Kernel, third party software issues will probably remain. The only thing I have heard the new kernel has addressed are numerous driver issues with hardware that didn't work well or at all in Vista. There is still hardware that doesn't work in Windows 7 to be sure, but they focused a lot of attention on that because it was probably the single biggest black eye of Vista.

I am writing Slayers in a laptop loaded with Windows 7 and it is working very well.

This is a Gateway MD7818U Laptop running an Intel Core 2 Duo T6400 at 2.00 GHz (32-bit Win7 Ultimate) with 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB HDD.

This Gateway unit is screaming with Win7! I bought it loaded with Vista Home for a steal, intending to downgrade it to XP and make it my new primary road machine, but was unsuccessful finding the XP drivers, So, I put Vista Ultimate in it (It ran like a snail.), stuck it in a closet, and forgot all about it for several months.

If this Gateway laptop has one flaw, it's my graphics package, but with Win7 it benchmarks on Performance Test 6.1 at 609.5. This compares to a baseline on an IBM A60 Athlon 2210 BL3714 (rated at about 2.2 GHz) that benches at only 498.8 (-18.2% less efficient) that is running WinXP!

More importantly, when I run Bongo`'s insertion system in straight Win7 mode, I don't get all of those screen gray-downs and extra layers of security verifications requiring keystrokes that I did with Vista when I executed the Lennus-II, Mystic Ark, and Feda insertion programs. In this Gateway with Win7, however, the insertion batch program for Slayers runs cleanly and quickly, and the emulator (ZSNES) flies through the game and the button commands without dragging.

I may not need to even try the XP mode in Win7 to do translation work and game play with SNES emulators.

I have high hopes that Windows 7 will be a decent replacement for XP, because nothing Microsoft dished out since ever came close.
I like XP very much but getting a fresher feel wouldn't hurt so long performance wasn't degraded (and hopefully improved instead).
Smart OSes are a continuous necessity so that they can make the most out of hardware, since it (hardware) doesn't grow off banana trees, as we say here.

Sure don't. That is the reason I'm still using a long since outdated single core athlon 64 3400+. (well, 2 of them actually) But I really shouldn't complain. It might not be as fast as the next guys system. And it might not be multicore. It does get the job done though. And in the end, that is the part that matters.

I just installed 7, mainly because my laptop came with Vista and 7 was free. (Roommate's got 8 Win 7 Pro keys through his school.) I figured it couldn't be much worse! It's much faster than Vista so far, which is nice. I can actually run an Aero theme without my system chugging like a coal locomotive. I'm of middling opinion on the new taskbar grouping/icons/behavior, but I think I'll get used to it. Also, with user account control turned on, I couldn't save anything to my c:\ root with Firefox (wtf!) I mean, I kind of understand *why* but still, that @#$% got turned off right quick.

I do have a few gripes, though.

* They've removed the "Size" display in the status bar. Instead you need to bring up the big ugly clunky "display pane" and if you select more than 15 items, you apparently have to hit a "Show More Details" button. THEN you have to do it AGAIN if you select any more items. This is bogus.

* The vertical spacing in list view is a bit too wide for my tastes.

* The horizontal spacing in the list view is no longer consistent. Each individual column is now as wide as the widest name in that column, as opposed to all columns having the same same width. I prefer the way it used to work, because it forced me to keep my filenames shorter, and it made everything look more uniform.

If anyone has any tips on any of the above, let me know.