Verified answer

Yea most games will work with vista, you just wont be able to play online unless you run as administrator. i play alot of older games on mine with ease. just make sure it doesnt have copy protection cd's by third party developers, Ex. FEAR WILL WORK STILL-LIFE WONT. And i dont use joysticks so im not too sure about that one but i would be pretty positive to say they will.

"Old computers" encompasses a LOT. I doubt you're going to get a Sperry or a DEC-10 to run Vista.

686 and better CPUs of the x86 CPU line, given enough memory (and that's a LOT), yes. That is, anything that ran Windows before (except the Dec Alpha version) is x86, but its got to be a pretty good x86.

However, like every Windows OS before it, Vista requires far more memory than its predecessor (arguably double). So, although your old Windows box might be upgradable to Vista, you'll probably want at least to add RAM.

Consider this an excellent time to recognize that

the entire MS-Windows operating system line is defective.

I recommend replacing yours with one of:

http://fedora.redhat.com/

http://www.opensuse.org/

http://www.debian.org/

http://www.ubuntu.org/

http://www.slackware.org/

http://www.freebsd.org/

http://www.opensolaris.org/

Any of these will be more reliable, less susceptible to

viri, uses your hardware more efficiently, and they're

all free.

Yup.