At the beginning of 7's life there were some pretty heavy backwards compatibility issues. As of lately it seems that 7 is a lot more compatible but I am wondering if perhaps those 7 issues were only fault of 64 bit 7 and not 32 bit 7.

I do know that in the instance of 64 bit XP vs 32 bit XP, 64 bit XP had tons of problems with games.

I'm not sure what bit 8 is however, but as I can upgrade to it for $15 and 7 would cost me between $100 and $200, I'm aiming for 8.

However I'll probably only boot into 8 for updates and games that require Direct X 11 only - For the same reason that I don't surf the net with Internet Explorer: I don't want to gum it up with adware, spyware and malware.

Internet Explorer is critical and exclusive for MS updates so I only use it for such. In the instance of dual booting, XP is much easier to weed out and clean than I'm assuming 8 will be so I'm going to keep 8 a virgin by using it only when absolutely necessary.

That Windows 8 dress chafes quite a bit on a PC, user interface sores start to become apparent after awhile and only a dose of Ubuntu, Fedora or Windows 7 seems to make that sore heal.

I've never had any problems with modern games on a 64-bit Vista or 7. Windows 7 64-bit is also the most common gaming OS, with over 60% share in the Steam hardware survey., so any new game is likely to work on it. I assume that development is done on a 64-bit platform, so these days that's would be the safest, most compatible platform.

Still, a Windows 7 key is compatible with both a 32-bit and 64-bit installation, so even if you start with 32-bit you're not stuck there for life. However you will need to reinstall everything if you upgrade. Also even when using a 32-bit OS there are utilities to use the extra memory as a RAM disk or disk cache (such as FancyCache), so it won't necessarily go to waste.