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Has anyone dual booted xp with vista?

16 years ago

A friend has suggested that I buy a notebook with Vista and then dual boot XP onto the system. (I may have worded the procedure incorrectly!) I need XP to run specific software. Has anyone added XP to your installed Vista hard drive without wiping Vista and running a dual boot?

Thanks for sharing your experience and/or thoughts.

abreeze

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Comments (4)

randy_ca
16 years ago
I have XP/Vista dual boot.
You can do it the other way around.
It's pretty simple to setup.
I use 3rd party software to do the partition, but it can be done in disk management with the shrink feature.
Install Windows XP in a Dual Boot with Pre-installed Windows Vista
abreeze
Original Author
16 years ago
Thanks, Randy. Staples has a 17" Acer notebook on sale for $649.98 with 1GB RAM & 160GB hard drive. It doesn't give the processor speed but it's the Centrino Duo Processor T2450. It comes with Vista Home Premium. I can't find any reviews for it and don't know anything about Acers. I've only bought Dell desktops in the past.

Do you have more than 1GB RAM? Do you feel your notebook's performance is diminished in any way having the dual boot? Thank you! :)

abreeze
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randy_ca
16 years ago
T2450 Processor Speed 2.00GHz

I have a very old (12-15 years) Pentium 3 PC 1000Mhz 1GB RAM.

No, the performance won't be diminished by the dual boot because the 2 operating systems are installed on separate partitions, so you only boot to the system of your choice.
You only have 1 system running at a time.
Dual boot is really kind of neat, when you boot up you get the choice of which os to use, use the up-down arrows to select one. Make 1 system your default, so you can boot and walk away and it will automatically load that system.
I know they're starting to say 2GB RAM for Vista, but 1GB has been fine for me. I had a cpu & ram meter as a sidebar gadget on Vista and the ram never used over 42%
The only problem you may have after the XP install is you might lose the Vista bootloader, so Vista won't boot, but that is easily solved with a small program called VistabootPro that will install the bootloader back on Vista.

I had an Acer notebook in my hands the other day, seemed fine to me, even though the lady had about a 100 programs running at startup that weren't necessary.
Is that a 17" screen, wow.
abreeze
Original Author
16 years ago
Thanks for the helpful and encouraging info, Randy! I especially appreciate the tip about the bootloader. The salesman told me that when Vista is wiped and only XP is loaded, some things that are built into the Vista system are gone - wireless capability in particular. I don't know if that would be the case if the Vista bootloader is lost or not. Thanks again.

abreeze

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