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My wife has a Dell Laptop with Vista Ultimate on it. She is having some compatability problems with vista and other XP machines she tries to get onto newtworks with. Can any of you think of a reason why we couldn't create a new partition in her HDD and install XP pro on that partition for a dual boot setup? I know I have to get system drivers from Dell for her Laptop on XP rather than Vista but other than that are there any issues you all can see??


P.S Is there any reason a USB external HDD cannot hold an OS and set BIOS to boot from USB??

Its possible to go from USB, but in my experience you run into more issues than anything else. I would just grab a GParted Live CD and resize the Vista and install XP. Which dell laptop is it?

Go here http://forum.notebookreview.com/ Most of the new Dell Laptops have ways to get XP working on them here

Aside from drivers, couldn't think of any. Had problems getting dual-booting via USB HDD to work with my old Dell Inspiron laptop so my suggestion is to just partition the internal HDD. Hmm, recommended order of installation is XP then Vista. Not sure if there's a reason for it (maybe the bootloader?) and how that would affect you.

I'm curious as to what issues she is having. Her connecting to others or them to her. I have been running vista in a mixed network for a while, but I have a sever that is a buffer between the two.

bubba wrote:I'm curious as to what issues she is having. Her connecting to others or them to her. I have been running vista in a mixed network for a while, but I have a sever that is a buffer between the two.

I can vouch that it works fine in workgroup setups. Got a single Vista Home Premium laptop inside a workgroup with mix XP, Win98SE and Linux machines. Simple file and printer sharing works fine for me.

she does accounting so I guess most of it is peachtree related issues. Peachtree is not fully supported on a Vista machine. It does work but I think they are having difficulty when my wife enters data on her machine in a Peachtree file that is then stored on the businesses server which is XP pro and my aunt tries to look over the work on her laptop which is also XP pro. She also cannot remotely access the server because of a conflict between XP Pro and Vista. Dell did tell us we could "wipe" the HDD and install XP but it would void the software portion of her warranty. We have not yet asked them if they have a driver suite for this laptop running under XP rather than Vista but they are definantly discouraging the switch. " You want to keep Vista it is the OS of the future etc." She is also having sleep and hibernation problems as far as the laptop restarting rather than going to sleep or hibernating when she closes the lid etc. which she blames on Vista.