Well, I recently upgraded to Windows 7 on account of how this game behaved on my old XP setup. Whilst I was arguably well overdue to do this upgrade anyway (the OS no longer being supported and all) I still had some initial minor misgivings that a game with such an "old school spirit" wouldn't play so well on older technology. 
I still had some issues with game performance here and there i.e slow downs whilst walking outdoors, some heavy increase in GPU fan speeds when in stores, even a couple of early crashes due to overheating. However, I gradually ironed these problems out and got stuck into it.
The game wasn't bad, I had some decent fun with it. It's certainly an improvement on IX, though I still think its inferior to 3-8 essentially overall, due to the lack of really memorable or deep dungeons.
At any rate, I've just recently finished my first playthrough with characters at level 32. I went for a fairly typical party: Dwarven Defender, Orc Hunter, Elven Druid and a Human Freemage. I found it amusing that my dwarf never really got close to my orc for pure damage output, despite having a might of 110 compared to 30 odd. Spears can be quite brutal it seems with high perception. Having grandmastery in shield also saved the party on more than one occasion!
Some more reflections:
I found that I had a ridiculous amount of gold leftover - some 400,000. Basically I couldn't really find very much to spend it on given the nature of relics and the plethora of loot. The game was probably the most tricky just after Act II, with exploration and trial and error being key to finding the most logical places for progression.
There were quite a few side-quests that I decided to leave until another playthrough, even one or two optional bosses that I never got around to.
Oh and a certificate of completion as from MM7-MM9 would have been really nice!
I still had some issues with game performance here and there i.e slow downs whilst walking outdoors, some heavy increase in GPU fan speeds when in stores, even a couple of early crashes due to overheating. However, I gradually ironed these problems out and got stuck into it.
The game wasn't bad, I had some decent fun with it. It's certainly an improvement on IX, though I still think its inferior to 3-8 essentially overall, due to the lack of really memorable or deep dungeons.
At any rate, I've just recently finished my first playthrough with characters at level 32. I went for a fairly typical party: Dwarven Defender, Orc Hunter, Elven Druid and a Human Freemage. I found it amusing that my dwarf never really got close to my orc for pure damage output, despite having a might of 110 compared to 30 odd. Spears can be quite brutal it seems with high perception. Having grandmastery in shield also saved the party on more than one occasion!
Some more reflections:
I found that I had a ridiculous amount of gold leftover - some 400,000. Basically I couldn't really find very much to spend it on given the nature of relics and the plethora of loot. The game was probably the most tricky just after Act II, with exploration and trial and error being key to finding the most logical places for progression.
There were quite a few side-quests that I decided to leave until another playthrough, even one or two optional bosses that I never got around to.
Oh and a certificate of completion as from MM7-MM9 would have been really nice!