The grass is greener on the vista side

RumbleBee

RumbleBee

RumbleBee

Associate
Joined
22 Dec 2002
Posts
1,190
Location
Teesside, UK
If like me your often re-installing your OS. Namely Vista and XP. Maybe your torn between the two and you hear of a new game coming out and it performs 50% better XP when you've finally settled on Vista, or vice versa if such an example exists.

Anyway it can get annoying and unless you dual boot you just have to live with and take advantage of those late night urges to 'go back to XP', only to miss Vista's superior visuals. Here's a solution for those with a spare Hard Drive.

Install Vista on Hard Drive 1
reboot and change the order of your boot drive in the bios
Install XP on Hard Drive 2 (Now your boot drive)

Neither drive will interact with each other. Whichever you boot you'll just have a D:\ drive with the other operating system on. Not really any dual booting going on. Once your settled on your proffered OS you can just format the other drive whilst in Windows.

Where this comes in handy is if you get the urge to go back to XP. You just have to change the boot drive priority in the bios.

Obviously dual booting is easier to flick between the 2, but I'm not sure how easy it is to be rid of XP or Vista if you decide to go back to running only 1 OS.
 
Personally, I see no difference between Vista and XP.

My laptop came with Vista but my other two desktop PCs run XP and Vista Inspirat for XP, fantastic skin.

I'd like to downgrade my laptop to XP (with Inspirat) but there's not much point - not much driver support.
 
erm... what's the difference between that and dual booting? you've got 2 OSes installed on one PC and can boot either of them. You're just using the bios settings instead of a bootloader.
 
Not really any difference from Dual booting through vista's boot loader. Just another way to keep hold of an XP install. I guess I was thinking along the lines of if I want to eventually remove XP I can just format the d:\ drive rather than destroying Vista's boot loader on the XP drive.

Then again if it's easy to do this then a popper dual boot may be better. Can Vista repair the boot drive. Shift itself to c:\ maybe.

I've assumed XP must be on c:\ and Vista on the second drive for a standard dual boot. Is that not the case? I seem to remember it was with 98 & 2000/XP

If it is. Where does this leave your c:\ drive if you want to be rid of XP.
 
badbob said:
Install XP and use a skin, and have XP's superior performance and lack of bugs.
Click to expand...

A skin doesn't get you the useful Vista features though. Providing your installation of Vista is stable (which mine is), it's so much better than XP, which feels basic in comparison.
 
Vista installs helluva lot faster than XP too.

I honestly havent felt vista to be slower than xp was, all in all im pleased with my Vista Ultimate 64bit.
 
I did have my setup the way the OP said a while back, but i end up just sticking with XP coz of the little problem i had with vista.
The problem i had was that i could not change resolutions, i was stuck on 1680x1050 and if i tried to use any other resolution my monitor would go out of sync, this ofcourse wouldnt be a bad thing using 1680 all the time but when i installed games and tried to run them i couldnt unless i edited the config files for the games to use 1680x1050 before starting them, this also is fine too but the fact that my setup aint powerful enough to run newer games at that resolution.
 
RumbleBee said:
Neither drive will interact with each other. Whichever you boot you'll just have a D:\ drive with the other operating system on.
Click to expand...
If it is visible, interaction is possible. Files may get dumped on D:\ ( recycle bin, system restore e.t.c )
You just have to change the boot drive priority in the bios.
Click to expand...
Sounds quite cumbersome. If you use a bootloader like Grub, you can set it up to boot Windows from the second hard disk and you can make it hide the other partition.

You could also have just one hard disk but install each OS to a primary partition and they will both think they are "C:\". The only problem is that when you come to delete one, you will be left with some floating free space and will have to use some tool to reclaim it.
 
TheVoice said:
A skin doesn't get you the useful Vista features though. Providing your installation of Vista is stable (which mine is), it's so much better than XP, which feels basic in comparison.
Click to expand...

Don't tell me Vista is much better, unless you class transferring files over HD and LAN 10% slower as "better"
 
Jumping said:
Vista installs helluva lot faster than XP too.

I honestly havent felt vista to be slower than xp was, all in all im pleased with my Vista Ultimate 64bit.
Click to expand...

wth.. your XP install must have been a 10yr old OEM install in PIO mode, or something :p
 
i always do what you do, dual booting can lead to annoying issues (like not being able to boot, without using recovery console to fix things)

pressing the bios boot key once in a while is better imo :)
 
badbob said:
Don't tell me Vista is much better, unless you class transferring files over HD and LAN 10% slower as "better"
Click to expand...

Hello badbob, the transfer problems only seem to be affecting certain users now. Since on my system and a few of my friend’s machines, the transfer rates are absolutely fine. :)
 
RumbleBee said:
If like me your often re-installing your OS. Namely Vista and XP. Maybe your torn between the two and you hear of a new game coming out and it performs 50% better XP when you've finally settled on Vista, or vice versa if such an example exists.

Anyway it can get annoying and unless you dual boot you just have to live with and take advantage of those late night urges to 'go back to XP', only to miss Vista's superior visuals. Here's a solution for those with a spare Hard Drive.

Install Vista on Hard Drive 1
reboot and change the order of your boot drive in the bios
Install XP on Hard Drive 2 (Now your boot drive)

Neither drive will interact with each other. Whichever you boot you'll just have a D:\ drive with the other operating system on. Not really any dual booting going on. Once your settled on your proffered OS you can just format the other drive whilst in Windows.

Where this comes in handy is if you get the urge to go back to XP. You just have to change the boot drive priority in the bios.

Obviously dual booting is easier to flick between the 2, but I'm not sure how easy it is to be rid of XP or Vista if you decide to go back to running only 1 OS.
Click to expand...
thats exactly what i do too, good work. :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom