Vista vs Vista/XP Dual Boot & Other Vista Questions

[nuschu]

If everything goes well I'll have all of my new computer parts by the end of this week. So, I was wondering if I should dual boot XP and Vista or just install Vista. I know MS released a performance pack and compatibility pack but I wasn't sure how far Vista was trailing XP in games performance. Is it enough of a difference to reboot to XP to play DX9 games? or has Vista closed the gap enough to nix XP?

I've really only used Vista on a friends laptop and I'm mainly buying it for DX10, BUT, I also want to get some experience with it and get used to using it so I'll probably try using it as my primary OS.

Next question....

I am putting two 500gb drives in this computer, should I put XP on one and Vista on the other? Or should I partition the first drive into 2 drvies and put XP on the first partition and Vista on the second?

Last question....

If I install a game in XP, can I install the same game in Vista to the same directory used for the XP install and still run it on either? or am I playing with fire trying that? Just seems like it would save space to use the same install location rather than installing it twice.


Thanks for the help...

 

[Cutthroat]

Personally I haven't used XP for months on my PC, and all my games work fine with Vista. You probably don't need to go through the hassle of a dual boot unless you know you have something that doesn't work with Vista that you can't live without.

 

[Cannyone]

I personally haven't had compatibility issues that kept me from playing my games. However, I have noticed with one beta (Tabula Rasa) that, for a time, performance was better under XP than under Vista x64. I then discovered that I could get superior performance on either system by running the game in a Window. Even though that "Window" is almost full screen, so it's a much higher resolution than it would allow in "Full Screen" mode... (All of my displays have a native resolution of 1680x1050.)