Building a new system with both XP and Win7

[hunter301]

I am looking to build a new system with dual hard drives were I can run both XP based games and Win7 games.
I built my old system back in 2008 but it is still an ATX case. Lian Lee P65. Has slides were everything can be upgraded by sliding out the idividual parts without having to dig into the system to much.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/coolers/prometeia-mach2gt/p4a.jpg
I guess the first question would be can I still use this case todays motherboards, graphics cards, etc...? Case was over $200. and I would like to reuse as much from the old system as possible. Case, CD/DVD drive, Sound card. (I had a very high end sound card at the time. Was made to be used for all types of sound editing, recording, etc..)
I realize I'm going to have to upgrade my graphics, most likely the motherboard with CPU's. I don't want to end up buying a graphics or motherboard with quad CPU's that won't run say windows XP or some of the older games. Will the newer motherboards and graphics cards run XP?
Nothing more frustrating that spending a bunch of money on a new machine only to find out it doesn't run a game for something stupid like the game company didn't figure their game for a certain graphics card.

[TG626]

ATX should be fine, so long as it has the studs for a mini ATX motherboard, which I believe it should.

You should check ahead of time for the minimum requirements of the games you want to run, of course. That's probably going to be the most daunting part - since video card makers don't follow a linear model number system - ie a Foo580 is actually a better card then a Foo4000.

When I jumped to Win7 I found that all the old XP games I had worked fine in Win7.

The big thing was that I had one game where I had to set the game folder permissions manually to be so anyone could do anything in the folder.

Seems XP is automatically that way, whereas Win7 defaults to much tighter security that can block a program from doing things like writing to its own config files.

Games were: flight simulator 2004, trains 2012, and some stuff off Steam Portal, Portal 2, Fallout New Vegas, Noir. Steam stuff may have self updated... Who knows?

My $0.02, YMMV. :)

[hunter301]

When I jumped to Win7 I found that all the old XP games I had worked fine in Win7.
My $0.02, YMMV. :)
Two questions:
One-
Where you able to play Silent Hunter 3 on Win7?
I can't seem to get it work on my Win7 laptop although SH4 works fine.

Two:
Can I just keep my old hard drive that I already have XP loaded on and upgrade new graphics card, motherboard, RAM, etc... without messing up the all the old games I already had loaded on my old system? I have a lot of older games that I have a ton of mods done to and would not be able to repeat the process.
Or do I have to go in and completely reset my motherboard to install the second hard drive for formatting for Win7?

[CaptainHaplo]

I can play SH3 on Windows 7 x64. That shouldn't be a problem for you.

You "could" keep your existing XP drive - but if you choose to do so I strongly suggest you do the graphix card change first and get it running under XP before you even add the second HD. If your changing motherboard, graphics card, etc all at once - you will need to "rebuild" the drive.

What I would suggest in that case is make a backup of your installed game folders (including mods). Back that up to another location - an external drive being preferred.

Then format the drive, install your hardware (minus the new HD) and install XP. Install your base games and make sure they run. Then copy over your backed up files to re-engage the mods. You may have to tweak some programs that still had the old graphics card settings.

Once that is done, then move the XP drive to secondary, install your new blank HD and install Windows 7 on it. Install all your drivers etc again.

Depending on the BIOS, you may be able to boot into a boot menu via a Function key - or you can edit the boot menu to give you the choice between the 2 OS's to boot from.

Enjoy!