Dual Boot

Welcome , TomW I have a dual boot Vista 64/ Windows7 64. configuration and have had no significant problems. Give it a try if you do have problems they will be easily solved by using this forum. Good luck and enjoy!

Hi Tom,

I currently have a quad (4) boot system - see my specs. No problems to report, however the only thing I would say is to boot into each of the OSes that you don't normally use at least once a week, if only to update the OS and security (AV / IS) software.

Hi Tom,

I dual boot with with these and have no problems as well. Well, other than I find myself running Windows 7 almost all the time.

Hi Tom,

I take it that you already have Vista installed, and that you have downloaded W7 and placed it onto a DVD ready to install. Firstly, you will need to shrink your current Vista partition and create a new blank partition ready to install W7 in. If you haven't already done so - see Disk Management - Shrink Partition - Vista Forums Next, you can install W7 into this new partition. Don't worry about the boot manager as this is automatically taken care of (unlike the old 9X days where you had to manually modify it). The only changes that I have made to the boot manager is to the display names of the OS (to make it easier to select the correct one), and to the timeout value, which I changed to 10 secs from the default 30 secs - see BCDEDIT - How to Use

TomW said:

Hey Myzr7, Brink and Dwarf~

Thanks for the welcome and the replies, guys. It sounds like it's a go then... I have the space, so it shouldn't be an issue. Does it set up like, say, Vista over XP in that it doesn't put you through the BootManager and 'downgrade' changes?

Brink, I've read a few of your posts about Win7 and how much you like the OS. I've read (John Dvorak in PC Mag) that in time trial tests, Windows 7 appears faster, but it's only due to better memory utilization of more commonly used executables (menu systems, etc.) and that it's actually not faster than Vista. (Well, I'LL be the judge of that! ) Any input on that? The article was about a month and a half ago, though, come to think of it.

This (Vista x64) is my first foray into the land of 64 bit computing, so even though I try to Google and look up things I don't know about, give me a little slack for the occasion 'dumb' questions I'm sure I'll be asking of you x64 masters!

As soon as I get a chance and have the time, I'll set it up and let you know how things go...

Thanks again, gentlemen.

Tom,

All I can say is that faster is faster. I see a noticable difference in how much faster Windows 7 is, but like anything, I'm sure it's going to depend on each person's system and settings. :)