Posted April 26, 2016
Themken: there will very likely be full driver support missing with an upgrade no matter which modern OS you would choose.
sunshinecorp: Not with Linux, unless he has some very obscure win-only soundcard or something. And then he could probably find a post on some forum somewhere on how to roll his own driver for it. My first hands on experience with Linux was having to "roll my own" (make it work on a newer OS than it was ever made for) driver for a printer, I failed. Of course, on Windows I would never even attempt to do that.
The OP could by all means try a live dvd/usb-stick of some suitable Linux distro to see how it works.