What are your thoughts on this? I have Win7 now but my laptop is reaching its limit with the newer games. I want to wait about 2-3 more years before buying a new computer, but I'm afraid that by then Win8 will be the standard and I may have problems running the legacy Win7 games. Minor or major compatibility problems?

Don't feel like searching for it, but MS has stated that the x86 version of Win8 will have full compatibility with Win7.

If I had to take a wild guess I would say Win8 will be the one to skip and Win7 the one to stick with.

As for games, Windows backwards compatibility since XP had been pretty damn good in my experience. Other than some really early Win95 and earlier stuff I haven't had many problems at all getting games to run on Win7.

For almost every piece of software that I've ever had trouble running on a more modern OS, the problem has always been one of two things. Either the software was designed to run on Win95 and ONLY Win95 (though hardcoded stuff in the program itself) or it has problems running on a 64-bit system. There are almost always jumps of 2-3 OSes in between. Like the other folks said, Windows is pretty decent about backwards compatibility.

I think the bigger issue will be whether stuff designed for 98 or XP will work on Win 8, not whether Win 7 stuff will work on Win 8.

Hee hee, I'm still running XP. :P I plan to custom-create a sweet-ass rig (well, my friend's in the building business) once I get out of college, in a few years. Frankly, though, this OS lets me do pretty much for what I have time (gaming aside; I'm still stuck with 1 Gig memory).

EDIT: Sorry, a bit off-topic. Bevinator's reference to XP prompted this.

Thanks for the response guys. Looks like Win8 will offer good backward compatibility on Win7 games from your experiences. The Win95 and earlier stuff, I have a Win2000 and WinXP laptops that should still run for a long time. I was just worried about new Win7 games that exceed my laptop specs, that I will buy when on sale and then wait to play them on my new Win8 machine.

Since this topic has been breached.

Can anyoen enlighten me why we need Windows 8 already? It seems like 7 is just finally getting established and now it's a brand new OS?

Anyone really computer savvy have any good reasons why they're doing this other then a cash cow?

I think mostly this MS's attempt to bridge the PC/tablet OS better than W7, WP7, Android, Chrome, iOS, or OS X.

Knowing microsoft it's just for the cash... however they'll come up with some excuse for making a newer version that nobody really needs. I think for windows 8 they're optimizing touchscreens though. (I read it in some article a while back. Not sure if it's right, but it sounds right seeing as touchscreens are the 'new' thing.)

Edit: The dude before me explains it better.