Partitioning, Formatting and Rebooting Vista!

Hey guys,

I've got Vista currently installed on my laptop, and I'm sick of having to do loads of work arounds to install old games, so I'd like to dual boot with XP.

I have a Dell XPS M1530, 2GB RAM. As it's a dell, the harddrive already comes partitioned with a C: and a D: RECOVERY drive. For some reason I am unable to partitiion further.

So here's what I'm after knowing, if anyone can help:

- Reformat the hard drive and wipe clean the old vista

- Reinstall Vista, dual booting with XP

- Add 2GB of RAM as XP can support 4GB whereas 32 bit vista cannot.

How easy would all this to be with little knowledge?

Thanks

 

First, check to see if your rig has the particular XP drivers available from Dell for your system. If all is OK there then you will have to shrink your Vista partition. There are plenty of guides out there, here is one. Have you tried compatibility mode yet to get your games working?

 

Yea, the main game I play is Football Manager, it plays fine but on a network game it makes other games in the network run slower. When we had a network game hosted on XP, it was much quicker.

Whats a rig and how do I check the compatible drivers?

Thanks

 

I've just found a program called Virtual PC- this claims to let me run XP within Vista. Does anyone have any experience with this program and is it any good?

WOuld it be preferable to a dual boot?

Thanks again

 

A virtual machine is a great addition to any system just so long as you have plenty of disk capacity and the box is reasonably quick. I use VirtualBox to host both an XP system and a Linux system within Vista. Great if you need quick access to a different OS, or for testing, but performance is affected compared with running off a dedicated partition. It does work faultlessly though.

 

Lol and about the rig, he means your machine ... I run 4GB of RAM of my Vista Ultimate and it detects 3326MB of it and pushes the rest over to shared Video RAM ... and yes, in addition to what DomLuc said, when my Vista is fully booted, not running anything but itself it takes 963MB of RAM, so in the end you'll have about 2GB to play with ... plus ... I'm just wondering why you don't simply move to XP? Providing you can find the drivers for your machine of course ...