Dual boot Vista and XP? #Fail!

K so I had two major problems with my Vista Desktop.

- Mainly my Wacom Bamboo, won't work properly, despite the advertising that it supports Vista. The guys at Wacom told me i had to disable all the features in order to get any functionality out of it, which kinda defeats the point right?

- Secondly (not vistas fault) but my video editing software conflicts with itunes, and obviously i need to be able to run both, not at the same time, but at some point i'll wana change the tunes on my ipod.

So i thought i'd found the perfect solution reading a tutorial on dual-booting Vista and XP on the same machine. I've got 1TB HDD so thought i'd set up the XP side for editing and Vista for normal day-to-day stuff. i was wrong!

I partitioned the drive and installed XP, well i tried.. the problem is that the Vista machine only wants to boot into Vista, and for XP to install it reboots itself halfway through then continues to set up windows.

I found and excellent piece of software called EasyBCD which handles the boot options for different Operating Systems. As XP installs it puts it's own bootloader in, then reboots and fails.

So i get stuck with 2 operating systems, none of which will boot. I have to boot with a partition disc, format the drives, re-write the bootloader and reinstall Vista from a recovery disk. Phew tried that bout 3 times now...

So i've been sat thinkin of an alternate method of getting the same results...ah VMWare.

VMware will let me have a virtual XP environment on my Vista machine, I can just run the Video converter that conflicts with iTunes on he virtual machine (all editing will be done on Vista, with VM closed to get the best render times possible.)

and the Wacom... would you believe it.... once I'd recovered Vista to the factory settings with the backup cd, I installed the tablet driver and it worked - PERFECTLY!

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Windows 7 - Vista's Replacement

So Windows 7 will be the new OS from Microsoft, and finally we get to replace that horrible Vista package.

I'm really hoping that they'll have listened to what people want from an OS and have addressed the issues we've all had with Vista. My main machine at home came with Vista pre-installed, but at times I've really considered just formating it and clean installing XP instead, there's just been problems installing stuff, drivers, programs etc just dont support Vista properly.

Anyway... Windows 7... what to expect? Well why not find out for yourself?

Microsoft are providing the Beta as a free download! but don't get to carried away, with dreams of free software. Some things to keep in mind are, it's only the first Beta, so still has alot of problems, the whole point of releasing the Beta is that we will all install it and tell them what problems we find.

In return we get a glimpse of what the new operating system will be like, i say 'a glimpse' in order to make something very clear, you are not gettin Windows 7 for FREE. In fact i've recently heard that the beta will end in August.

Whilst it's a nice idea that the testers would get it for free, can you imagine the effect this has on their initial sales. On the first day the Beta was available the servers crashed cause so many of us went there looking for our free copy.

Well with all that said, if you're still interested in testing the Beta for Microsoft you can head here to download it.

Warning: Don't install this on your main pc, chances are you'll blank your computer and end up with a buggy version of Windows that'll only last till August. If you've got a spare pc, burn a disc and give it a try.

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