I was just wondering if XP mode is required to play Oblivion and Morrowind on a computer running Windows 7, because the laptop I plan to order soon comes with Windows 7 Home Premium and apparently XP mode is only included in Windows 7 Professional. Can these games run without XP mode, can I acquire XP mode without buying Professional, or do I need to spend the extra money?

Sorry if it's a dumb question, I'm just about to finally jump into the world of PC gaming.

The game runs fine on Windows 7 for most people. Though I do suggest installing the game outside of the default Program Files directory and somewhere like C:\Games or something to avoid UAC problems. Also what graphics processing unit does the laptop have?

It has an Nvidia GTX 460M GPU with 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory.

And you'll have to explain that bit of advice a bit more, I'm new to Windows, always used Macs up until now.

Good laptop GPU. Ah the User Account Control is the little box that pops up in Vista/7 asking for user permission when trying to run a program. It gets somewhat annoying when trying to start up programs. http://www.dedoimedo.com/images/computers/2008/windows-7-uac-nag.jpg

But you can always disable UAC. I keep mine disabled. Or when installing the game, just choose a different location then the default one.

Gotcha. And thanks, I'm pretty excited to get the laptop ordered, glad I don't need to worry that it won't play the games (I already bought them on a bit of a shopping spree last week).

I ran it on windows 7 home premium with no problems ( not installed in the default directory of course )
Also about xp mode (I assume you mean compatibilty mode) I'm pretty sure that is standard with any version of windows after xp; at least I always had it.