Old games and compatibility

[BEN90]

I recently purchased an alienware m14x gaming laptop, it has yet to arrive and since I am a bit of a tech newbie I was hoping someone could help me out on these forums.

When I get my laptop basically I want to buy a whole bunch of old games from steam like Monkey Island, Half Life etc. as well as the latest games.
Due to current tech running on windows 7 and 64-bit, in terms of compatibility how would I get these games to play without causing software errors?
For example, if it was Monkey Island would I just switch the compatibility of the game to say Windows XP and change my current display settings to 32-bit?

I appreciate any answers ppl can give me!

 

[darth pravus]

Half life is fine on windows 7 and most games are. Very few issues are had from steam games.

 

[Soda-88]

Make sure you check the system requirements before buying old games on Steam. If it says Windows 9x/ME then you should further investigate if it's going to work on Windows 7. Everything else that's compatible with XP and above will work on 7.

 

[tinyE]

Oddly enough, just a couple of days ago I got an itch to play Monkey Island and Full Throttle again, and found they both work flawlessly on ScummVM. I tried Scumm a few years ago and it still had a lot of bugs but the latest version is a beauty. It is freeware and easy to find, but if you are lagging in tech knowhow, like me, make sure to follow the readme.

 

[cats_Paw]

Old games can always be runned on newer OS, just some take more work than other.

For example, ONI and Fahrenheit need a spcial EXE and a diffrent form of installation.
Hell, im playing sega mega drive games (from steam) on win 7 latly.
Golden axe, altered beast, streets of rage 2...
Thats some good ****