There has been a lot of discussion about moving past XP and many, myself included, were planning on sticking with XP because our old software would not run on Win7. However ...
Recently I bought a couple of bargain basement Win7 laptops off of www.1sale.com to mainly use for internet access when support for XP was going out. When I received them I was quite happy with them for the $$$, but in poking around to see what they had in the box I discovered they were Win7, 32 bit OS rather than 64 bit OS. So, I said to myself, self, I wonder ......
So I started trying to load my old legacy software (Site Survey, AutoCad 2002, etc.) and it not only loaded fine, but it works just fine as well. So, I just received some new Win7 boxes for the office and am in the process of setting them up. All is good with my world.
Now a couple of things. You need to make sure you get a 32 bit OS system, so order carefully (mine are Dell through my local reseller / geek) and they are limited to 4 gig of RAM with a 32 bit system (and that includes video).
What I haven't tried yet is if legacy printer / plotter drivers will work or if I need to keep using a work around of running printing and plotting through an XP machine. But that's not a big deal because once you get it set up you don't see any differences when printing / plotting.
So, you can step up, save your old software, and not have to use XP emulation.
I've had zero problems with Win7 and legacy software, save TGO, and some of our software was much older than ACAD2k. You just have to remember, prior to installation, to install as an admin and in XP SP3 mode and it works like a champ. This is on the 64bit system.
Generally I have not had a problem running old software on Win7 (including the 64 bit) - everything I've tried, including TrimMap worked fine.
But getting drivers for old hardware is another matter entirely.
At least if you go for the 32bit version you can "persuade" it to use XP drivers.
I have an old Nikon Slide scanner that took quite a bit of fiddling to get to work - helps to be a geek or have a tame one available I guess.
I'm not an expert at this, but my Geek told me that if you are running in XP emulation mode you are susceptible to the XP vulnerabilities. That's why I didn't want to go that route.
I'm not running an emulator. That run in Win7 native format. I simply install it with XPSP3 and run as an admin. It worked well.