It's the day before Microsoft unleashes Windows 7 to the world at large and their latest operating system for PCs has gotten a lot of praise compared to Windows Vista, which was released with tons of performance problems and compatibility issues. But what if you want to upgrade your existing PC or even buy a new one? The big question for you is whether an upgrade to Windows 7 is right for you. The chaps over at BigDownload try to give you some hints:

If you own a PC with Windows XP: Despite Vista's release nearly three years ago, PC game developers are still making their titles with Windows XP in mind and for good reason. A large fraction of the world's PCs still run the operating system that was first launched in 2001 and Windows Vista's launch issues kept XP from being supplanted. Only a couple of games have been released for the PC that run only on Windows. One was the poorly handled port of Halo 2 for the PC. Another was the recent RTS bomb Stormrise from The Creative Assembly and Sega. Officially PC desktop can no longer sell PCs with Windows XP installed although extended support for the OS will continue until 2014. At the moment, you don't need to upgrade your PC from XP to Windows 7 immediately. However, Windows 7 will almost certainly hasten the end of XP as a PC gaming platform and within a couple of years it will likely be the dominant OS on many gamers' PC rigs. Windows 7's native support for both DirectX10 and DirectX11 (something that XP doesn't have) is also a plus as game developers move onto the next generation of graphics. So while you don't need to rush out and get your upgrade disk tomorrow, you may want to think about putting Windows 7 in your PC by the end of 2010.

If you own a PC with Windows Vista: Oh boy. First, we are sorry. Windows Vista has been one of Microsoft's worst OS releases in some time. While some of the issues have been fixed via patches and driver updates, the gist of it is that Vista, launched in January 2007, just didn't work out of the box as advertised. Microsoft tried to tie in the launch of Vista with their Games For Windows marketing launch to get more people into PC gaming. The reception to that has been mixed as well with many popular PC games bypassing the Games For Windows branding altogether.

If you have a PC with Windows Vista and it doesn't work right, upgrading to Windows 7 is almost a must. It's basically the same architecture as Vista but Windows 7 runs faster and has better compatibility (and that's just in the release candidate version). However if you are happy with your Windows Vista PC there isn't a real reason to upgrade anytime soon. Vista already has DirectX10 support and will also support DirectX11 just as Windows 7 does. Microsoft will also keep updating and servicing Vista for several years, unlike Windows XP which near the end of its life.