[Roller]

If his motherboard is so far in legacy status, it might present some issues. I remember going through a similar situation with AGP, when 8x was introduced and different voltages were set, which made near impossible to install an AGP 8x on 2x/4x motherboards without flashing the BIOS.
 
Now if 2 to 4GB of memory makes a difference, well it does. The whole system is more responsive, and from the moment many games only enable higher settings when running on x64 OSes, that by themselves require more memory than x86, then I'd say memory is important and fundamental.
 
And OP has not even talked about his plans about OSes, how he plans on getting them, etc.

 

[RYCeT]

What kind of games will you play? If you like to play older games (Diablo2, etc), get XP. I upgraded my old desktop to windows7, too much work involved to get it able to play older games.

 

[BlackbeardBen]

Quote:

What kind of games will you play? If you like to play older games (Diablo2, etc), get XP. I upgraded my old desktop to windows7, too much work involved to get it able to play older games.

Agreed... My favorite rally game of all time, Xpand Rally, will not work with Windows 7 under any circumstances, whatsoever.

 

[Roller]

The best of both worlds would be to grab a 1TB hdd as they are cheap now, and dual boot XP and 7. There you go

 

[majestic12]

^or you could just make partitions and do it -I'm running a triple boot right now (XP, 7, and Ubuntu) -it's awesome!

 

[sysfail]

Your computer specs is between my old computer and my new one. The old one uses Windows XP and the new one uses Windows 7. I would say Windows XP but I'm sure you can run Windows 7 just fine as well, just turn off all that "extra" stuff that uses up resources.