dual booting

[board2death986]

Yep another thread about this sore subject

Anyway for upcoming and existing vista only titles, it's coming time for me to install vista on my gaming rig, i've tested it on my other rigs, and well i'm not ready to let go of XP.

So my question is if there is anything special to making dual booting possible? As i understand it i just install each OS on a different partition or drive and choose which OS to load during the boot sequence.

But I've seen videos were mac laptops were able to run both their OS and the windows OS in tandem and switch between them freely, is this possible between two windows' operating systems (vista and XP)?

And one last thing pertaining to activation, how much would it suck if i changed out one piece of hardware and had to re-activate both XP and vista? (my xp install had reached it's max for activating online, and im tired of calling their india-based hotline to activate it)

 

[Gorankar]

I prefered to have them boot off of different drives, when I was dual booting, but different partitions is fine too.. Just install Xp first then install Vista to different dive/partition.. That method will rely on Vista's boot loader to let you select which OS to boot..

They way I did it is install both to drives that were hidden from one another and used my mobo's boot drive selector to decide what OS I wanted to boot into.. Just turning my pc on would boot me into xp, if I hit the esc key during bios post screen it would let me choose which drive I wished to boot..

You could run Xp through VM in Vista, but there is a performance penalty.. If you are using Xp for games that just don't run or run right in Vista, then I would dual boot.. If there are just a few apps that are not too demanding that you need Xp for then VM should be fine for that..