Install Vista alone or dual boot with XP?

I currently have wins xp pro on my dell notebook, I have the vista ultimate that I want to install would it be better to just have Vista on the computer or should I do a dual boot, what are the drawbacks to having a dual boot? I currently have a Dell XPS M1710 with 2gb ram, 233ghz cpu, 512mb video card so I know that it will run Vista.

 

I been booting XP & Vista for about 4 months now. I actually triple boot XP, Vista & Ubuntu(Linux).

I would advise to Dual boot XP & Vista for the simple reason that some Drivers & Games don't work or play well with Vista yet. So you might still need to run some Games, Drivers/apps on XP.

I really don't see any drawback to Dual booting.

 

Why do you want Vista? Are you sure you want Vista if you are thinking about dual booting? I don't know how much HD space you have but I wouldn't want to big ole OS's eating up all my space.

Did you buy Vista for your Laptop, or for another machine but you are thinking about putting in the laptop? If so install it on the other machine. From the system spec's I would guess you game. Several sites have pointed out that XP is better for gaming right now than Vista. No sense in slowing down the laptop.

I personally would keep XP.

 

It completely depends on your needs. All my systems have been updated to Vista, though my main workstation/gaming machine is setup as a dual-boot for those games/apps that don't play nice with Vista. On a notebook (unless it's your main/sole machine) it doesn't make a lot of sense to waste the hard disk space having both installed... though if you have the space to spare, then it definitely doesn't hurt anything to have both available.

I know that's kind of a non-answer answer, but I'd hate to tell you to just get rid of XP completely, then find out you have some driver/software issues with Vista.

 

Vista is actually faster than XP and wouldn't slow things down at all.
And with those specs, he most likely has at least 80 - 120GB Harddrive.

I wouldn't BUY Vista now tho. But if you already have Vista then why not dual boot it.

 

currently triple boot (XP-Vista-SuSe) on my beat up eMachines

I would definitively keep the XP partition until vista matures a bit more and until Dell can garantie all drivers are vista capable.

recommending 20-25gb for vista partition if u can spare it. start vista out stock , do not jump into updating drivers unless u really have to. add/install app one by one or making shorcut referencing to XP partition accessing ur current apps there and try out first - have fun exploring/learning/being (sometimes) frustrating

cheers ...

 

Thanks for the responses, I have a 100gb hdd I was thinking of doing the dual boot to make sure that I won't have any issues with drivers etc., I purchased the oem full version of ultimate vista so I think I will dual boot with both for now.

 

Dual booting XP and Vista here, I allocated 30GB to Vista, works great.

 

Hello,

You seem to be able to dual boot vista and xp, could you please tell me how?
I have a HP pavillon which had vista preinstalled in it, I createda nother partition where I installed xp, but I need to use the programs VistaBootPro from xp to boot into vista and EasyBCD from vista to boot into xp.

Can anyonehelp?

Thank you

 

You can use VBP to boot into both. Tell it to reload the Vista bootloader, and make sure both XP and Vista are listed as viable operating systems on the front page. From there, everything should work.

 

thank you for your reply.
I already tried this, but each time I tell the VPB to fiz the XP entry, I get the loader screen and can boot into vista but get an error when triying to boot into xp :non existing or corrupted file (windows/System32/winload.exe).
That is why I need the EasyBCD to be able to go back to xp, meaning I need to go to one OS first, configure a program to be able to go to the other OS...