Indeed they won't be Windows 10 only, when 10 becomes the minimum requirement, they'll work on the version(s) after it as well. When Windows 7 drops out of extended support in five years, though, you'll see usage drop quite heavily if it hasn't already by that time, and developers won't care much about it.

And yeah, of course those two by themselves are not enough of a reason to upgrade, I mainly mentioned them as a counter to "Windows 10 continues the trend that started with windows 8 to make windows a viable contender in the tablet market", which I misinterpreted to "they're only useful for tablets" (sorry about that), but I would, however, say that Windows 10 is more desktop oriented than Windows 8 is (not that 8's start screen doesn't work with a pointer, it does fairly well, but it's clearly optimised for fingers).

a new Windows OS = even more compatibility problems for older games.

I finally have all my favorite classics installed and working on Win7 thanks partly to GOG and all the cool people in internet land that make source ports and launchers, fixes, etc....

Problem is, a lot of games developed for Win7/8 are going to have problems working in Win10.

But, I've still got a working Win98 pc. So it shouldn't be a problem to keep this Win7 laptop running as long as possible. I just have to replace the CMOS battery every 10 years just like with the Win98 pc.

I would say Windows 7 remarkably improved compatibility for many games, in my experience. I definitely had trouble on XP and Vista with games that run perfectly on 7.

It is a danger though, certainly. The gaming industry as a whole tends to refuse to look backward and preserve.

Well if anyone even like win8 of any flavor. You obviously work for MS lol.

I mean thinking on what windows flavors were before. It makes all the ones everybody hated look good. Irony. Nothing is compatible, but underlies the greater problem. Microsuck-it people seem to believe everyone can drop a grand on a new machine and another few hundred on a touch screen. Well if that didn't seem silly to you. How about this, who the hell wants a 25 inch touch screen when you are sitting in front of a tower? Or even on a laptop at 15.6? You have your mouse and keyboard in front of you. Yet they made an OS designed for tablets specifically and thought...gee...people are dumb as a brick(which is kinda true >_>), people will buy a tablet OS for tower and laptops bahahahahahahaaa....

Which even most stupid people figured out..."meh...win8 = garbage"

I would not worry about anything being to compatible with it. 90% of the people here are old school and keep old systems. As a game comes round that is made compatible from, say GOG. It is just the icing on the cake for convenience. =D

Wow, really?

No not really, everything that runs on Vista easily runs on 7, 8 and 10.

It's the *same* OS after all.

It really is not a big deal. It is quite expected.

I'm not using my bias. Sure, I have my preferences, but what I'm saying is based on how I perceive other people feel in general. When you post that your sister is using Vista and not willing to replace it, that certainly says that she find it usable. I'd also say that if you like playing new games, and you have a choice between XP and Vista, then Vista is clearly the way to go. Sure, 7 is better, but Vista is a usable platform.

In terms of personal bias, personally I don't like the Windows 8 interface, but that doesn't make me hate Windows 8. I can, and have, used it (with Classic Shell), but I still prefer Windows 7. I can still step back and realise that other people can use, or even like, Metro, and I've also tried Windows 10 and think its solution is a good middle ground (even though I still prefer the Windows 7 aesthetics). We were talking about graphics and DX12. Adding other peripherals to the discussion doesn't seem to me to have a point. If that's a general argument about Vista, it just stresses how the Windows 8/10 situation is different, because there is no such problem. That just strengthens the idea that DX12 could be a draw, because the rest of the problems associated with Vista's launch don't exist in this case.

There are some compatibility differences between versions of Windows including the most recent ones. Windows 8 in particular made some changes to rendering and mouse control that affects certain games. GOG has included Windows 8 fixes with the installers for many of the affected games on GOG.

Mouse control did not change in Windows 8, it changed in Windows 8.1 which is the same commercial branch of the OS. But in reality there's as much difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8 as there is between Windows 8 and Windows 8.1

They are iterations of the same branch. Windows 10 will be too. There may be some changes, but none are fundamental and most are quite easily remedied.

More old titles are compatible with Windows 8.1 than Windows 7 in my experience. There is no special rule that says newer releases of the Vista branch make things more incompatible.

It's most useful to think of everything from Vista to Windows 10 as the Vista branch of Windows. Everything from Win95 to ME is the same branch as are Win2000 and XP. Between those three branches are major compatibility issues. Within those branches, there are no or minor issues.

Let's not forget that WinME was widely maligned also. No more booting down to DOS, amongst other issues. That's part of the reason XP was such a breath of fresh air.

Anyways, exceptions don't disprove general rules. I think that's enough said on the matter.

Actually, that's actually precisely how things are disproved, by finding exceptions.

The idiotic good/bad theory falls right in the beginning. Which is why people trying to push this stupidity as a "general rule" ignore everything before Windows 98. Because they quite liked Windows 95. And Windows 3.1 as well.

The claim is that from Windows 98 every other Windows release has been "bad". Except that isn't true at all, because: Windows 2000. A very good OS. Which is why that OS has to be defined out of the "theory" like everything before Windows 98.

So now that we pretend nothing existed before Win98 and that there was never a Win2000, the theory starts to come together.

Except for Windows 8.1 which we will have to define as the same OS as Windows 8, even though it isn't the same OS (any more than Windows Vista is Windows 7)

The "general rule" is looking more and more like a twisted pretzel than a clear pattern and it is that shape only to hate on Vista and Windows 8.

It was a stupid theory to begin with and when examined closer, it's downright retarded.

Irony of the day, and it's early! I guess they're giving out unicorns and free crack at every street corner in Iceland.

If there was more than a single exception, you may have a point. However, given the information present and not taking it merely at face value, means that that particular exception doesn't disprove anything. Overlooking the intrinsics of the information pertaining to the set of data that makes up the rule means you don't understand the basis for the theory and then will likely to continue to play the single string available to you. In short, cherry-picking results in fallacious reasoning and resultant arguments.

Um, no.

The line goes from [url=http://%20Windows%20NT]Windows NT[/url], 2000 (Server) to XP, Server 2003 and then Vista, Server 2008, 7, 8.x, Server 2012, 10.
The other line went from DOS, Win 3.1, 95, 98(SE), ME. And died there, fortunately.

The "consumer" line were basically GUIs for DOS (even if they hid it from W95 on). This branch died after the disaster that was ME.
The "professional" line started with NT 3.1 (formerly known as OS/2 3.0), had various iterations and 2000 part of this branch. The underlying technology has nothing to do with the DOS/95/98/ME branch. I know that many "home" users went for 2000 - if you had internet access it was the sensible thing to do since the consumer branch was a nightmare when it came to security. The disadvantage was that it wasn't able to run DOS games (and some Win95 games that used hacks to access the underlying MS-DOS). I used to have a triple boot system, Win2k for daily work and networking, Win95 for most games and MS-DOS for games like Strike Commander that needed special memory treatment to work.

XP marked a break - They got rid of MS-DOS and based all Windows versions, consumer or professional on the NT kernel. That was the only option to make common people's OS at least a little secure in the internet age. The "consumer versions" were just stripped of some features that were deemed "pro" (like i.e. a real account management and ACL, or even remote desktop). The server versions usually have a slightly different (internal) memory and priority management, more administration tools, less "ballast" (like games, movie maker).

Of course this meant that DOS games were dead for the time being and W95 games that gave trouble in W2K had exactly the same problems in XP. Since XP was meant as a consumer OS and "dumb consumers" won't understand why their old stuff won't work anymore, they began implementing emulation and compatibility layers for older software. On the other hand this spawned the developement of software like DOSbox.

I had Windows 7, and 8 (later 8.1) installed on the same PC side by side, and I kept e.g. graphics drivers up to date on both partitions. So I had a perfect system to test the differences between 7 and 8. There were some problems here and there, e.g.:

- Gothic had some visual problems in 8, showing window borders on full-screen mode or something. GOG fixed this later I think.

- Haegemonia (from GOG) worked fine in 7, but crashed in 8 if you tried to start the actual game (I think intro still worked). I recall pretty much every Win 8 user here reporting the same back then. I think GOG has fixed this compatibility issue too, even though the game card still does not list Windows 8 supported. Not sure if they have just forgotten to update the game card, or if there are some remaining Win8 issues there.

Then there's that MIDI thing, how Microsoft seems to try to make playing MIDI music (also in classic PC games) harder and harder with each new Windows iteration... Apparently some MIDI software broke in Windows 8, and needed to be reprogrammed for it.

http://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth/faq About the claims elsewhere that Win8 runs games faster than Win7... I didn't find that to be true. Usually the results were identical in both 7 and 8 (on that same hardware and same driver versions), including the 3DMark benchmark tests. I didn't find benchmark reports online either validating that either (e.g.in one article it was hit and miss, usually the performance was the same, some games were faster in Win7, some in Win8; overall same same).

While I didn't think Win8 was quite the disaster some people made it to be, in retrospect to me it offered hardly any advantages, and some drawbacks, compared to Windows 7. Now my Windows 8.1 installation is broken (thanks Windows Update!), and I see no reason to try to revive it for now.

Not that I am fully happy with Windows 7 either. In desktop use it is occasionally oddly "clumsy", e.g. what's with it blanking and going through all my desktop and taskbar icons one by one, whenever I e.g. restart the machine, or enable my work VPN? I've seen this happening on four different Windows 7 PCs, even with a fresh Win7 installation. Both XP and Windows 8 desktops feel more instantaneous. Maybe it is the Aero that does that.

Who says I'm in Iceland?

There's not just more than a single exception to the retard theory, the theory itself is so dumb that you have to exclude basically half of all Windows releases to make that crap stick.

You are literally cherry picking results. You are. Don't you dare accuse me of doing what you base your entire impotent nerdrage pissass theory on.

Um yes Windows NT isn't a release, it is a family of operating systems. Starting with Windows NT 3.1 and Windows 2000 wasn't a server OS any more than Windows 7 is a server OS. There were at least three distinct versions of Windows 2000 (aka Windows NT 5.0) and of course a server version existed, as in most Windows releases, as did a professional version.

It's a laundry list of factual errors you're espousing. Do you actually believe what you are writing because someone told this to you or are you just fabulating on your own accord? Feel free to look up the actual facts of NT releases.

I clearly put all the NT releases in a branch because they are one branch, but there is a major divergence between NT 5.1 an NT 6.0