Legit Reviews

Alright, I know that I'm going to do a dual boot at some point , I just don't know when . My question is about drivers.

Will the 64 bit drivers conflict with the 32 bit drivers for my hardware and stuff? Will I have to install 32 bit drivers in xp 32 and then install 64 bit drivers in Vista?

If I install a program (say Daemon tools x64) in Vista, will I also have to install the x86 version in XP? And will I need to install other programs that don't have different bit versions twice?

Thanks in advance

Yes, you will have to install drivers for each OS. 64 bit for Vista and 32 bit for XP. Better yet toss the Vista out and stick with XP. I'm through with my dual boot. Vista is a slug.

Sparky wrote:Yes, you will have to install drivers for each OS. 64 bit for Vista and 32 bit for XP. Better yet toss the Vista out and stick with XP. I'm through with my dual boot. Vista is a slug.

that really wasnt necessary. if he wants to dual boot, then he should go for it.

i myself have the same boot setup, and i use vista for a LOT. once i get a second harddrive i probably will switch completely over to Vista and just build an XP box in the offchance i need XP for something.

and yes, 2 different OSes means 2 different installations per system for any program you want on both setups.

But it is true...Vista is a slug.

yes it is. especially vista x64

My 64-bit Vista runs just fine. Takes a whole 4-5 seconds to load and nothing takes long to open. No idea where the complaints come in, other than Vista uses 900MB-1.3GB of memory.

guys stay on topic. OP didn't want your opinion on the OS, he just wanted some guidance on how to use it. Keep your Vista Bias out of the thread

dicecca112 wrote:guys stay on topic. OP didn't want your opinion on the OS, he just wanted some guidance on how to use it. Keep your Vista Bias out of the thread

here here!

no problem with the dual boot, and installing vista after xp was no problem :D if you have any questions, just respond and i'll get back to you!

Alright, I'm in the middle of it now. Well the 32 XP version at least. So...my question is this. I partitioned my drive into three parts, C (XP, 30g, yeah I know its more than needed, but I have plenty of space on other hard drives), D (Vista, 30g again) and E (280, which i plan for my programs/games).

So..I take it I have to install the 32 bit drivers on C drive for xp. Then reinstall all the 64 bit drivers on D for Vista. Is this correct?

And then, the last question I could I just install all games and programs, like word and firefox and all that jazz on E and have both OS's work them?

Then say I use something like daemon, which has 32 and 64 bit versions. Could I install the 32 bit version on C and the 64 bit version on D?

I'm talking in circles I'm sure, mostly because I'm confusing myself

Thank you for all your help so far

The having the apps independent of your OS wouldn't really work very well, as when you install the applications (onto E:) they need to add things to the OS itself (like registry files on C:/D:). So while some of them might run on both OS's, you will probably have a lot of problems with trying to run most programs this way.

Dan

Well, I tried it with a 100g partition for each, installing programs and drivers separately and whatnot. But I keep getting a memory management blue screen of death in Vista that just simply says "Memory Management" in the report. The error uninstalls or screws up my nvidia drivers and I'd have ot uninstall them until it just wouldn't reinstall. So I think I'm just going to stick with XP. I'm just upset that I'm not going to be able to use anywhere near the full extent of my ram, since I have 4 Gigs of ram and 640MB on my video card.

Maybe I'll try it again once SP1 comes back out. Thanks for all your help.

Sparky wrote:Yes, you will have to install drivers for each OS. 64 bit for Vista and 32 bit for XP. Better yet toss the Vista out and stick with XP. I'm through with my dual boot. Vista is a slug.

Sorry guys, didn't mean to bag on his or her desire to install Vista. Just expressing my frustrations with it. I just had to reinstall XP on my system after running dual boot with XP / Vista because I messed around with some settings in Vista which resulted in neither of my OS's being bootable.

Yeah, Vista is neat looking but I personally had some older hardware that it wouldn't recognize (HP flatbed scanner) so just be sure to have all the latest drivers on a flash drive or burned to a CD or DVD before you install Vista so you can install them right away should anything hang up on you.

I also had problems with RivaTuner not wanting to load correctly even after suspending all the warnings.

All that being said, dual boot is still the best way to go IMO so you can have the best of both worlds.

DoubleOhPsycho wrote:Well, I tried it with a 100g partition for each, installing programs and drivers separately and whatnot. But I keep getting a memory management blue screen of death in Vista that just simply says "Memory Management" in the report. The error uninstalls or screws up my nvidia drivers and I'd have ot uninstall them until it just wouldn't reinstall. So I think I'm just going to stick with XP. I'm just upset that I'm not going to be able to use anywhere near the full extent of my ram, since I have 4 Gigs of ram and 640MB on my video card.

Maybe I'll try it again once SP1 comes back out. Thanks for all your help.

Try installing with only 2GB running.

and the issue is what? I'm running 2gb no problem

Wasn't there a problem with installing with 4GB that some other user posted about?

They had to install with 2GB then get a patch from somewhere and put the other 2GB back in.

Dan

Yeah, installing with 2GB fixed it. Then there was a bunch of patches that installed and I was able to put back the other 2gb of ram. Everything is running smooth now. In some ways I do like Vista, I do like the eye candy since my systems is fast enough to support it, and I like being able to use all my RAM when encoding stuff, and using 64-bit support in games like Supreme Commander and such. But I don't like the explorer for files. I hate the inability to move things around the same way I could in XP and the cleartype (but I'm sure I can find a way to disable that). Oh well.

Thank you guys for all your help, the dual boot is working fine now. You guys were more helpful than any other site!

DoubleOh

DoubleOhPsycho wrote:Yeah, installing with 2GB fixed it. Then there was a bunch of patches that installed and I was able to put back the other 2gb of ram. Everything is running smooth now. In some ways I do like Vista, I do like the eye candy since my systems is fast enough to support it, and I like being able to use all my RAM when encoding stuff, and using 64-bit support in games like Supreme Commander and such. But I don't like the explorer for files. I hate the inability to move things around the same way I could in XP and the cleartype (but I'm sure I can find a way to disable that). Oh well.

Thank you guys for all your help, the dual boot is working fine now. You guys were more helpful than any other site!

DoubleOh

Glad to hear you got it sorted!

Alright, one last thing. It's really just an annoyance and nothing big, but since I installed Vista on the partition, XP's automatic logon keeps turning off.

I change it in regedit for autoadminlogon to 1, it changes back to 0. I used TweakXP and it gets disabled. I tried adding a password, removing a password, and it still turns off after every reboot if I don't change the registry entry every time. I've scanned for viruses and even spyware scanners (no idea why I thought it might work, it was a last ditch effort).

Anyone know what might be causing this?

Not sure why that is happening. I have dual boot set up (though both 32bit) and my password autologon still works fine.

Dan