The way BZFlag does multiplayer may be of interest to you. Most servers (other than clan matches) run continuously, with players joining and dropping whenever they want. There have been times when I wished other games offered the same style of multiplayer, but I don't know of any others.

You can get a data-only U-verse account, but I had to ask through their sales chat in order to get a link to it. They charge $99 for installation unless you bundle cable with it, but there's no contract so you can cancel whenever. Here's the link, I'm not sure if it's still valid: https://uverse1.att.com/un/launchAMSS.do?target_action=serviceabilityCheck

I'm a XP user who skipped Vista and is currently running Win7 (MSDNAA) on both of my machines (an old P4, 2.8GHz, 1GB ram; and my new core2duo 3GHz 4GB ram). I started playing with the Beta version of W7 for the HTPC I build for my parents, mainly to use the windows media center. It worked well enough for them, but I'm still keeping an eye out for the OEM/system builder pricing (hopefully it'll be closer to $100 like XP and Vista OEM for the full (non-upgrade) version).

The main reason I decided to try out W7 was the media center, and that the x64 version of XP wasn't exactly well supported (jumping through hoops to install iTunes). DirectX 10 support was only a minor consideration.

That being said, I still can't get the media center to let me use a s-video input without an IR blaster, because it wants to control everything, even though I have a separate DVR for that. If anyone knows a workaround for this in W7, let me know - the Vista solutions I've tried have failed.

I haven't come across too many programs that no longer work going from XP x64 to W7 x64. My "Windows Entertainment Pack" with 16-bit games doesn't work, but that's about it. I do miss the signed, 16 bit int scores with negative numbers at the top of my high score table in tetris, though.

If I couldn't get W7 for free through MSDNAA, I'd probably just keep running XP - as a poor grad student, I don't think it's worth $100-200 over XP.

http://www.xkcd.com/277/