help with operating systems.

[valcan222]

Hey everyone, its been awhile sense i have been on this site as i had some eh... computer problems but you guys were always helpfull so hopefully you can help me with this.

Ok i recently got a new laptop. its operating system is vista premium x64. i have been doing some study cd's that make me install a program to run them and well you guessed it, they dont run on x64 only x32. i bought the vista home x32 and was wondering if there was a way i could install it on this laptop in a seperate partition of the hard drive and only use it for these disks without having to get rid of the x64. i would only be using the vista x32 for these disks and nothing else, do you guys think you could help me do this?

or if it is any less work i could install windows xp instead of vista. my only problem is i have one hardrive in my laptop and would need them both on the same hard drive.

thanks in advance
Brian B.

 

[Kharn]

Are they saying that they will not install at all?, I am running vista x64 and when I install a 32 bit application it installs in C:\program files (x86)\ and I am running them without a issue.

 

[valcan222]

alright i installed it on my current opperating system vista x64 when i click the shortcut to open the program i get a popup that says

"the version of this file is not compatible with the version of windows you're running. check your computer's system information to see wether you need an x86 (32-bit) or a x64 (64-bit) version of the programm. and then contact the software publisher"

and on top of everything it is a old program

but that is what it is saying so i figured it would just be a good idea to make my hard drive have two operating sysyems. one for everything else i use and one just for this one program.

one more thing, if anyone has an idea on how to make this program work on vist x64 that would be much better for me than dual booting vista x64 with vista x32 or windows xp. just a thought if anyone has an idea that would be great

thanks
Brian B


P.S. Also i had one other idea. if i had an external hard drive. would there be any way to install xp or vista 32 on that hard drive and only plug in that hard drive when i wanted to boot xp? just a thought but i hope it makes sense.

 

[Kharn]

Right click on the exe and set compatability mode for XP.

 

[valcan222]

alright i did try setting the compatibility settings to xp but i got the same popup i got before. any other ideas?

 

[Kharn]

Are you sure you did it on the exe and not the icon?

 

[valcan222]

yes i went and found the exe. not the icon. the icon doesnt even give the compaitbility option in it i belive.

 

[Sheepykins]

You can install two different operating systems onto the same drive and select which to use from the onboot start menu (least you can with XP, im no vista expert) but theres no way to partition the drive without losing your current data so i'd leave partitioning out and dual boot a second operating system.

of course i could be completely wrong in my approach but thats what i'd do, and then maybe a 32-bit around and run a virtual operating system, lets you run an OS inside another OS. handy if you want to switch to it quickly to run one program

 

[valcan222]

hey sheepykins, so if i was to run a virtual operating system it would allow me to switch to another OS quckly so i could just use this one program and then switch back? and is that all done after boot or do you still boot a different OS from startup?

alright i looked up what a virtual operating system was. and i do think that if i could make one work it sounds like it would work. does anyone have any input on them? would they allow my program that requires a 32 bit OS to run ? if so how can i go about getting a cirtual OS on my computer?

 

[straightv6]

start here VirtualBox