Question on dual booting (changing os)

[mnelson07]

I currently have my WD 750GB partitioned to 450GB for XP Pro and 250GB for my Vista Ultimate. However, I am thinking about installing XP Pro 64-bit because of the performance gain and the increasing probability of me upgrading to 4GB (especially if I get the xp64 going).

So, my question is I used Norton Partition Magic to partition the drives as previously mentioned. Can I just boot with my XP disc and delete the Vista partition? Or should I use Partition Magic to remove the Vista Partition and leave open to install xp64bit on?

Also, will the dual boot screen look weird? Because it's obvious with Vista installed because it says "Vista" or "Previous version of Windows". I guess if it works I'll probably wipe the WHOLE disc and install xp64bit and partition again to have vista. No reason to dual boot the same OS only in 32 and 64bit flavors. Might as well stick with the faster one, especially with 4GB of RAM.

 

[Deadpixel]

Hey not to be advertising but I suggest you go to these forums.

EasyBCD Support - The NeoSmart Forums

That is were I go and their is one guy who knows like everything lol. He should be able to answer all of your questions and it is what I use dual booting windows XP and Vista on separate hard drives.

 

[dario03]

I believe Vista has a boot manager that allows you to change the name of "previous windows". Or maybe that was EasyBCD...

In any case I've never heard anything good about xp64. But are you going to get rid of xp or vista? Because IIRC you shouldn't need to delete Vista unless thats the one your getting rid of.

 

[eyeCpc]

You won't see any great gain going with the 64bit version of XP Pro over going for a 64bit edition of Vista that now finally sees more driver support for the 64bit editions of Windows. The XP Pro edition sadly lacked any real support and turned out to another MS flop there.

EasyBCD offers one thing not found in the boot.ini section of the msconfig utility namely renaming "previous version of Windows" to Window XP, XP Home, WINXP Pro, etc. in that sense but decides the default version that will load. In Vista the msconfig utility now simply sees the "boot" tab since there is no boot.ini file by that name in the new version's root directory seeing the boot manager file dario03 is referring to.

In that tab you use the advanced button to control settings on a dual boot there. The EasyBCD tool offers the advantage of setting the boot order through a desktop shortcut rather then through the msconfig utility there. Never use the VistaBootPro tool however.

One simple word about 4gb is that most desktops still never have a need for that amount of memory installed. If you are planning to run super large eingineering or CAD or even graphis design software like game developers then expect to have requirements for a larger amount of memory while 2gb is usually quite adequate even on gaming rigs since games in general still only use 512mb or less according to design.