[grandpafred]

Background:
Just got a new Acer Travelmate 4730-6764 laptop with Windows Vista Business With Windows XP Professional Downgrade CD. I need to use XP Pro as I have some apps that are not Vista ready that I need on this machine. The machine came with 2 disks... disk 1 travelmate 4730/4330 system cd and disk 1 travelmate 4730/4330 recovery dvd (ms xp pro).

I have not even powered this baby up yet as I would like to have my ducks in a row before I do. My main concerns are whether I might be able to find xp drivers for laptops hardware, and how exactly to go about doing a downgrade to xp. The laptop has a SATA drive and I've run across some items stating some difficulty in downgrading with this type of drive?

The drive is 160GB which is more than enough for what I use the laptop for so I am thinking maybe a dual boot of vista and xp is a better choice than a downgrade to xp? In my past experience with Acer machines they have all come with the drive partitioned into two equal sized logical drives c: & d: which to my way of thinking should make a dual boot easier?

Do you think a dual boot is a smarter choice?
Any tips on how to achieve a dual boot? (never done that before)

Any ideas comments or tips greatly appreciated.

[chaos]

Well, I would be fairly surprised if anything in the laptop was not XP compatible... I would think the most you would give up is *maybe* DX10 support. Vista is too new to have very many things with drivers Vista only. SATA is fine for XP, I've got XP dual booted with Linux right now on a SATA drive, no problems. If you had multiple SATA's, and threw RAID into the mix, things might get more complicated, but I would hope all 160 is on one HD.

I would probably recommend dual booting if you can, just because eventually Vista will be popular and it's nice to be familiar with it. And besides, with Vista you can play all those new DX10 games right? ;-)

As for the "how" to dual boot, there are tons of tutorials out there. I'm using GRUB, but that's mainly because I have Linux as a second O/S. From what I recall, all you do is modify the boot.ini in MSCONFIG.

Oh, and the way they have the drives partitioned usually is of little help to you. I personally wipe their HD's and partition them my way :-) I wonder why they would give you two to begin with, unless it's a recovery partition... usually those are useless if you know a little bit about installing XP/Vista yourself :-)

[grandpafred]

Chaos; Thanks for the reply. I've done a little playing with the laptop and vista so far doesn't seem to be horrible. Things are a bit different from xp and will take some getting used to and not everything is where you would expect it to be (took a few minutes to find out where I could set up the ethernet connection for example); but probably no different an experience than going from win3 to wind 98 to win xp. And you're right, I'll eventually probably have to know at least something about vista so I might as well keep it.

I have no idea why Acer does their drives that way but every Acer I've seen is set up that way out of the box...

All that being said... I'm beginning to think a dual boot may not be needed. My investigation into software applications and vista compatibility hasn't yet yielded any that say they 'won't work' with vista, albeit some may have some minor issues. Most of those issues seem to revolve around 'Aero'. I know Aero is some sort of 'triumph' as far as vista is concerned, but all that eye candy frankly disturbs me and I see no need for it, at least not now, and have already disabled it.

I guess if I run into an app that I absolutely need that doesn't work with vista I could probably upgrade that app or find a replacement.

Thanks again for the reply

[deathshadow]

Vista with SP1 and drivers that actually WORK is in general not the complete TRAIN WRECK Vista has the reputation of being.

In my own experience of Vista up until september it was useless on my hardware (Q6600, 4 gigs RAM, Quartet of Samsung F1's 750 gig drives, nv680 mainboard, ge8800GTS, Audigy 2 ZS Platinum, EMU Morpheus) not because of the OS itself, but because of buggy drivers. They even put out a report about how 70% of all vista error reports were driver related, the lions share of that being nVidia. SP1 didn't fix my issues sending me back to XP x64, but on a lark I tried it when a friend said the latest drivers fixed most issues - and lo and behold...

With the new nVidia and creative drivers I'm on Vista Ultimate x64 now on the same hardware that wasn't even stable for twenty minutes at a pop in Vista before, and I couldn't be happier. Rock solid stable, the x64 drivers are finally reaching maturity (I even got my canon printer, notorious for bad x64 drivers working)

It even seems to be faster than XP x64 at some games, and in others it doesn't net me much more framerates at the same settings, but I can crank settings with less impact - exactly what DX10 was SUPPOSED to promise.

So like you are finding out - You might not have to dive for that dual boot anymore.

Besides, if I can still run Thief 2: The Metal Age without a hitch on x64, I'd really not be that worried about compatability.

[grandpafred]

Thanks deathshadow; I just recently read something similar regarding drivers. The problem becomes how to stay updated with drivers. I'm not finding it too bad actually thus far; albeit I haven't loaded up much software or anything yet.

[chaos]

Ya, Vista is finally "coming of age", though I can't say that I'm going to spend money to upgrade to it :-) If it came with a new machine, I would keep it, but no sense upgrading this XP machine :-) (even though it's more than capable). At this point the difference is negligible for me considering I don't have a DX10 capable card (my EVGA 7600GT Overclocked still plays anything I'd be interested in), and Aero means nothing to me.

DS is right though, Dualbooting is a lot of hassle now considering Vista is pretty much stable at this point.

[Adrian]

Well, nevertheless I use Windows XP, don't really like Vista...

[ByrgerTidesson]

I alway think that XP is better than Vista, and also I suppose dual booting harms performance. So I wpould rather downgrade.

[Infrasound]

Also XP fan. Vista is not as good as Xp... At least for now.

[Everfalling]

I would rather downgrade to XP, this is one more paradox of Microsoft - to work better you need to downgrade...

[deathshadow]

Or you could live the life of risk and run the free public demo of Windows 7 Beta (get in line now folks, it's working)

I've just installed it, After I use it for a week as my primary OS I'll post my results to a new thread.

[Expert]

I am using Windows XP, because vista takes many sources. I think that I made productive choice.

[TerrorHead]

Sup,

I (desperately) am seeking/ searching for a (re)solution here;

System restarts constantly after choosing for the Windows XP option, on the Windows Boot Manager Screen;

Where is the boot.ini file from Windows XP located, as I could not find it in the ' I386 ' folder of the Installation CD;

B.S.O.D's, B.S.O.D's and yes, more B.S.O.D's are haunting me since then ...

I've already placed the files ' NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM and BOOTSEC.BAT ' on both the Vista and XP (core) folders, C:\ and E:\ respectively;


Any insights in making this nightmare a part from the past, would be greatly appreciated;


Holla, if ya hear me ...

[susan123]

Windows 000-793
Vista was launched with much fanfare and was touted as the operating system for a000-797
new generation with a slick graphical interface and many new features. But the reaction to Vista has been mostly lukewarm, and many customers are looking for a way 000-815
to "downgrade" from Vista to Windows XP.