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Dual boot advice requested

J

jalaram

Lifer
I recently got a HP Quad core system that has Vista Home Prem. 32 bit installed and working. I've installed some basic tools that I need and most things are working as expected. However, there are a few annoyances. E.g. no Vista drivers for my scanner, VPN program for work is flaky and HP has put a lot of junk on the system.

I have 6GB of RAM now and a copy of Vista Ultimate Retail Upgrade. Ideally, I want to use Vista Ultimate 64 bit as my main OS, but am not sure how drivers (other than my scanner) and the VPN will work out. So, I would like to dual boot to a stable working OS when that happens.

One thought is to install XP 32 because I know the VPN and scanner will work. Plus, I know how to use XP 32 and am comfortable with it. However, HP doesn't offer drivers for XP. I've found links in their support forums for XP drivers, but it's all my responsibilty. Plus, all advice I've seen suggests that I put XP on a separate drive from Vista.

Another thought is to leave Vista 32 as is and dual boot with Vista 64. The advantage there is that the system is running (albeit with the annoyances). Do I need to put Vista 64 on a separate HD or will a separate partition be good enough?

One last thought would be to reinstall Vista 32 from scratch. That would remove all the extra junk that HP puts on, but I don't know if I can use the OEM key with a retail upgrade disk.

I have had dual boot systems in the past, but I tend to stay in one OS and have the other OS just as a fail safe.

 
If anything, I would use the "best of both worlds" - the king of x86 Windows - XP, and the best in x64 - Vista 64.

That's what I have, although I have not used XP since early January. It is a "safety valve", in case something goes terribly wrong with Vista 64 or any driver/software.

And yes, I would recommend installing both operating systems on the separate physical Hard Drives. It will make it much easier to finally settle on one OS, and reformat the other drive.
 
You can use an OEM key with RETAIL Vista install media from what I've consistently heard.

Your scanner and such MAY work using drivers for XP32 or XP64 installed under the respective version of Vista, though it is best to have VISTA certified drivers. Because of driver signing issues you're more likely to have XP32 drivers work with Vista32 than XP64 drivers work with Vista64.

Usually 32 bit applications designed for XP work pretty well V64 with no changes other than to maybe install them when elevated to administrator.
Sometimes selecting XP COMPATIBILITY MODE for running the program (right click options stuff) will help even more.

I'd say the same applies even moreso for running XP32 apps under V32.

But if all that fails and XP32 is offering you significant benefits in compatibility that you can't achieve with any work-around on Vista, yeah, go ahead and dual-boot XP to get the job done.

Since you don't own XP and it isn't supported by your system vendor that's a more expensive and annoying option though since then you'd get to track down all the HP XP drivers etc. if you use retail XP install for your HP.

You AFAIK are already authorized to use V32 AND V64 with your current vista license, so dual booting between V32 and V64 shouldn't cost you anything extra once you have the install media for both versions.

I might suggest installing Vista 32 in one partition, checking the compatibility quickly with your stuff, if it works, keep it, if not replace it with an XP install in that partition.

Then install V64 in your other partition to dual boot with whichever OS works well for you in the other partition.

Actually just speaking for your scanner, LINUX with their SANE software works pretty well with a lot of scanners with minimal user setup required in many many cases... so just for scanning dual booting LINUX or even just booting a LINUX LIVE-CD and scanning onto a mapped NTFS drive (LINUX should be able to read / write your VISTA drive as long as you remember to SHUT DOWN VISTA and not HIBERNATE it first) then once you have your scans done just reboot into Vista.



 
Thanks for the replies.

I do own a copy of XP Pro 32. If I don't use it for the dual boot, I will sell it. However, I was just wondering if I should even bother trying. It won't be expensive since I have it, but as you said, it might be annoying to get all the drivers (and get it working).

It would be a big plus if I could install Vista ultimate 32 on one HD and Ultimate 64 on the other HD. I was just worried about the activation since the key would be same on both. That's why I thought I had to install Vista 32 using my OEM key (and thus, Premium only). Thanks for letting me know though that I can install Vista 32 cleanly with the OEM key instead of using HP's recovery disks (which I assume would put all the crap back).

Thanks,
JC

 
I don't know how official this statement is, but I saw the following at:

Text

Posted by Nick White

Hey Gavin: I'm not going to interpret the license for you, but I will state that you cannot install both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista simultaneously on the same machine (nor on a second machine, for that matter) using the same device key / PID.
Click to expand...
 
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