I've come to realize that the OS i use the most nowadays is Windows 7 again. I've completely stopped gaming and lost my interest for hardware around 2013 and have been using Linux most of the time ever since.

My golden era of games and hardware is 2004-2009 when i was a teenager. I still had hardware from 2011-2014 laying around built some kind of "overkill" XP rig and ended up dual booting Windows 7 because i wanted to play the last games i really enjoyed 10-15 years ago such as Metro 2033, Bioshock Infinite, Far Cry 3 and Doom 2016.

I ended up installing my favorite games from the 2000s on the Win7 partition and realized that except for not being able to enable EAX through Alchemy in FEAR, the experience was just has good and didn't require more tweaking. All the tweaking i had to do under XP was hardware related (such as cfg files to fix texture and resolution issues in games likes Doom 3, Quake 4 or Prey) and is the same under both OS. I had some occasional crashes under XP that are not happening anymore since using the LAA (Large Adress Aware) patch under 7 x64. Assassin's Creed, i'm thinking about you.

I find myself using this PC a lot for pretty much anything that isn't online and i think 7 is still a relevant OS and maybe the pinnacle of what MS could do and certainly the last great Windows for offline gaming. I wonder how many of you are still using it and how do you feel about it being 16 years old. I guess it could be nostalgic for someone younger than me, similar to what XP is to me. In my case, i just think it is a solid OS and the one i'm the most familiar with.

On a side note, i'm not sure XP is that relevant for games from the Vista era. Most of my favorite games are from this weird era having EAX and DX10 at the same time. I guess this build became the Overkill x64 DX10 2007-2009 PC. It seems like my other build is doing a better job at a straight forward XP rig.