dual booting

[ares32585]

I just finished reading the Tweak3d article on dual booting Win2k and Win 98. At the end of the article it says to "reinstall all your programs under Win2k".
Does this allow you to run programs under both Win2k AND Win98 by saving half the space, and not having two, to all appearances, installs of the same program? Could someone clarify that for me?
Thanks.

Edit: One more question. How does deciding which OS to boot work? How do you change that?

 

[Ausm]

This what I did

1)partition my drive into two fat32 partitions

2)Install WinME\98\98se on the C drive

3)Install Win2K on the D drive

4)reboot computer it gives you a boot option on fire up

5)Load programs that are win98/Win2K compatible in both OS's but in the same location

6)Load non compatible(WIN2K) programs for Win98/98SE/WinME on the C drive and Win2K only compatible programs on the D drive.

Good Luck

Ausm

 

[JawaJedi]

You don't really have to reinstall all of the programs. What i did was for the programs that were compatible with win2k and win98/winme(whichever you chose) was just copy the shortcuts from win98/me over to the win2k start menu. While Win2k may not recognize that you've installed these programs (i.e. winamp, it will just run mp3's using WMA, i prefer winamp... but thats just me) you can still run them under Win2k.

As for your second question, you should install Win98/ME first then Win2k and under Win2k, go to "my computer" and under one of the tabs, which i'm not sure at this moment since i'm running win98, you should be able to decide which OS you want to be the default boot and what not...

And on a related note, i'm in no way an expert on this subject, the above solutions are just from my personal experience... good luck.

-JawaJedi

 

[BCYL]

You have to install programs in both OS's when you dual-boot, because during most programs' installation process, they write to the system registry and copy files to the windows directory to work. If you only install the programs on one OS and copy the shortcuts, they may not work properly...

You can however install the programs at the same location, so both versions share the same database (ex. ICQ), and you can save some space.

 

[jaywallen]

The only thing I would add to what BCYL says is that, unfortunately, there are applications which keep local configuration files within the program directory. If critical settings within these configuration files differ for the two different operating systems, you may well wind up with behavioral problems in those applications.

Eveyone has her / his own reasons for dual booting, but I can't imagine loading a significant number of the same types of applications in both partitions on a dual boot Win98 / W2K system. I'd load stuff that worked best in Win98 on the Win98 partition and stuff that worked best in W2K on the W2K partition. Or, if I were comparing the two OSes to see which handled all of my applications best, I'd just do separate installations to separate locations, otherwise, I could be fairly certain that I was accidentally biasing the testing in favor of the OS under which I installed the common location programs last.

My $.02.

Regards,
Jim

Danged Typos!