New motherboards, old operating system(s?

[Roffen]

Can anything general be said about the compatibility of today's crop of motherboards (ASUS is what I have in mind) with respect to older versions of Windows, like XP, or 7? I presume versions 8.1 or 10 should be expected to work, but what about drivers compatible with the older OS versions? POS Ready XP is supported until 2019, but will POS ready users be able to replace hardware in the interim?

 

[captaincharisma]

it just means OSes like XP will continue to get security updates from MS till that time. that doesn't mean hardware vendors are required to support it

 

[Eximo]

Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 and to a lesser extent 10 are all the same Windows family and are derived from NT 6. (Though MS has rebranded Windows 10 to actually have a kernel number of 10) So 9/10 a Vista driver will still work in 7, 8, and 8.1. Of course there are exceptions, and you can always try out MS default drivers. Surprisingly effective for basic use.

Hit or miss with XP support since the majority of computers, perhaps all by this point, come as 64bit machines. Storage is probably the most disconcerting as you might not be able to get drivers for RAID/SATA controllers to work in XP. And audio might be another potential hurdle. Pretty sure Nvidia has dropped support for XP, not sure on AMD, so an old GPU might be needed to get full performance, otherwise you'll be stuck in low-res.

XP 64bit was somewhat reliable, but drivers were pretty hard to come by then. Can't even imagine now. (We discovered a lot of weird glitches networking an AMD 64 and standard X86 Intels at the time)

If you really want an old OS on a modern system then you should just look into Virtual Machines.

I run XP Pro on my Windows 8.1 laptop. Company that wrote the software I need went out of business some years back and never got around to a new release. I'm pretty handy with getting that kind of thing to work, and that one stumps me, somewhere deep in the code it bombs and uses an entire CPU core.