Dual Booting Vista and XP Pro

[Bushwacker]

Don't know if anyone here has done this or not or if you plan on doing it, but Ive been doing it now for instructors all over the campus. I just wanted to give you a heads up in case you want to do it. This way you can play around with it and still have XP for your games and such.

First thing you should do is zero out your HDD.

Second thing is to install XP and use it to partition your HDD.
If you have the space try and give it at least 40 Gigs to Vista.

Third thing to do is install Vista. It's that easy. Don't let anyone
try and tell you different.

Also there is a utility you can get that
will let you edit the boot.ini You can get it HERE. (http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1) I wouldn't try
editing the boot.ini in Vista, just trust me. Using this utill allows you
to give it a better name when your presented with the choice of OS's
to boot to when you start your machine. By default it says something
like "Load an earlier version of Windows or something like that. It's lame.
Your going to notice something too. Vista takes over everything.
When you install XP it's set as the primary C:\ well after you install
Vista that goes away and Vista is now the primary C:\ and D:\ is now XP.
Anyway I just thought you guy's might like to know about this.:)

[Almuric]

Interesting stuff. I agree with the 40GB. When I setup this laptop I made a 30GB partition for the OS and I only have 12GB free. Pretty crazy that Vista is such a disk hog.

[Bushwacker]

Yeah it's a pig, but with the prices for HDD's being so low now day's it's not that big of a deal. I'm getting quite comfortable with Vista. Ive been using the Enterprise edition and for doing everyday things it's good to go. Ive even put Unreal Tournament 2004 on it and it had no problem at all. I know there are a lot of games out there that have issues with it right now but as I said for doing most everything else it does pretty good.:D