Running Vista and XP

[Marsher]

A friend at work bought a notebook with vista on it and does not like the operating system. She wants to put XP on the computer but leave vista for furture use.

Can she do it? How?

[AMD]

Yup. Split the drive with a utility such as partition magic and install XP on the secondary partition.

I'm not sure if 3rd party software is necessary to dual boot with Vista.

[compygeek]

Yup. Split the drive with a utility such as partition magic and install XP on the secondary partition.

I'm not sure if 3rd party software is necessary to dual boot with Vista.

Yep you will need 3rd party software to repair the boot loader for Vista (VISTA and XP use 2 incompatible forms of boot loaders). If you're going to install XP with Vista already installed, the XP boot loader will take over and ignore booting Vista, therefore you won't be able to get back into Vista, since you won't get the option to boot it. If the laptop came with a VISTA install DVD, you can use it to repair the Vista boot loader, but you'll need an application like Easy BCD (http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1) installed on the VISTA OS to add the windows XP OS to Vista's Bootloader.

[igiveup]

By the same token, Last nite I installed Vista Home Premium on a computer already running XP Pro.
I partition the drive using Partition Magic ver 8.0 and fresh install Vista without the serial number ( for trial as per Microsoft) and the dual boot was performed flawlessly. I can now boot to either system from the boot menu.

Good luck

[awesomejs]

i did the same..i have dual boot..xp, and vista 64 bit...i like vista better..loads faster few features i like..haven't been on xp for months now....