[daeron80]

The One-eared Barn Cat OS held some promise, but they couldn't get a mouse to work with it.

Backbeat, it's an easy move from XP to Win7. There's very little you will have to learn. Anyone who is familiar with XP will immediately be at home in Win7. Almost everything will feel familiar, but better. Nearly everything will work faster and more reliably. Just to be safe, install it from scratch on a new drive or freshly formatted partition. That way you can boot to XP when needed. It will let you do that with the upgrade version, which is a bit cheaper.

That said, I used PT9 on XP for two weeks for some mixing and editing, and it worked great. I didn't do any tracking with it, so I can't speak to that. But for mixing, one session had 62 tracks and loads of plugs, including a couple of VIs. Never a hitch. My only problem was that the MIDI drivers wouldn't install, so I had no MIDI I/O; but I'm 99% certain that had to do with a problem unique to my system because I had had several other installers fail to work properly over the previous few months. When I upgraded to 7, the same sessions appeared to use a little less CPU than they had in XP, which is consistent with my experience that Win7 is more efficient overall.