Jango40

Don't see why you'd want to limit yourself for the sake of a dated theme, 64bit 7 will blow away XP since stated the hardware compatible to use the 64 bit OS is limited which means you're more than likely using the 32 bit version and limited to 3gb of RAM which is nothing.

I'd love it if I could downgrade to 7, but my laptop's stuck running 8.1 which SUCKS

Dual boot. I run Ubuntu on my Windows laptop, should be able to do the same for Win7.