[paulycy]

Do you think win 7 would be a better choice than XP on a Dell Inspiron 8500 that can only access 1Gb ram due to a motherboard problem?

[papasmurf]

Depends. If you have a lot of old software, then you should probably stay with XP. It is a decent OS.

Win 7 Pro and Ultimate will ship with "XP Mode" (actually 2 CD's-one is a modified Virtual PC and the other is an XP "image in .iso form.

Then again, your processor would have to support Virtualization, and Virtualization does have a performance penalty attached to it.

So, stick to XP, or upgrade to UBUNTU , it's FREE! LOL