She started with XP on a laptop to run the programs that control her various machines. She keeps that laptop exclusively XP and uses it when she has to, but is slow. She also has a dell inspiron Duo (net book) that came with windows 7 that will run the programs. The Windows support person said that the mother board in her HP desktop was not made to run win7. The desktop starts up with a screen that says the windows 7 she is running is not genuine. She can close that pop up and run programs for a few mins. then it crashes to a blue screen of death.
If it were me, I would run Linux on the netbook and migrate the XP drive into a virtual machine and running under Linux. I bet it would work just fine.