Windows 7 is fine. The key insight is that the HW and SW move together. You would not like Windows 7 on HW that is 5 years old and you’d probably not like XP on brand new HW.
But get a new machine with 4 Gig RAM a nice video card and a 1 TB Harddrive (and make sure you get at least Windows 7 Home Premium) and you’ll be very happy indeed.
And make above machine dual boot Windows/Linux (FC14) as I did and you’ll be happier still.