>But if you were to run into a problem with not being able to use
>some particular piece of old hardware or old software

I had this problem with a new-ish Canon colour laser printer. For 6 months that was unusable because they didn't have a 64-bit driver for Windows 7. Eventually they did release one, which wins them lots of brownie points from me. Many manufacturers would not have bothered supporting a legacy product like that.

If the manufacturer doesn't release the driver for your peripheral, the hardware is just junk.

Dan