Win 7 laptop - XP drivers ?

[garywork]

Hi

i've xp and vista;d an old laptop tears ago , just to see what Vista looked like

wondering on a new Win 7 laptop - not so much the actual mechanics of a dual XP boot but the driver issue for graphics , network and no doubt chipset ?

is there any general pointers to all this ?

or is virtualisation the way forward ?

i have some unusual software I could do with running for now

Thanks