Dual Boot?? Feel free to yell at me.

I'm running XP SP2 on a HP pavillion zv5000 laptop, Pentium 4 HT 3.20 GHz, 2 Gigs of RAM, 100 gb HD. I want to use upgrade to Vista (don't ask why) but don't want to give up my stable XP OS. Can I do this???

I hear there are programs that can partition your hard drive for dual boot setups. Any suggestions?

Do I have to buy the full Vista, or can I use Vista upgrade?

Anyone know of a good dual boot setup tutorial?

 

you can certainly do that, but be sure to understand what you're doing before you do it so you dont mess up the XP partition. You should be able to use a Vista Upgrade disc, as long as you have your old XP disc handy.

Basically, you need to create a new partition (which means you might have to resize the XP partition) and install Vista on the new partition. You can use the default microsoft MBR and boot.ini files to load the different OS, or you can get a boot loader like GRUB.

Here is a tutorial to do exactly what you asked, i believe. http://apcmag.com/5023/dual_booting_xp_with_vista

 

I've been dual booting with Vista for a couple of years now and it works great, actually I went up to a quint boot for a short time but my box is not a laptop. A couple of things to think of, when you shrink your drive partition, try to have some 30GB for Vista at least, don't use Partition Magic and you might have a problem with Vista drivers for your laptop. Other than that, enjoy it!

 

I ran microsoft upgrade advisor and got the following "Your current video card will not support the Windows Aero". I have a ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000/9100 IGP. Will this really be a problem, will it really prevent Areo? I ask this because my friend is running Vista on an older notebook (don't know stats exactly) but he got it to work.

 

It might work, but your system would be more sluggish. You can always turn off Aero, though.