Dual OS question

mordeith

Hi all.
Quick question here. I am planning on installing XP Home alongside my current OS (XP Pro). If I do so will I be able to access all the current programs, games, etc, that were installed under XP Pro or will I have to install them separately under XP Home?
Thanks.

aidan_walsh

Words cannot express how much you do not want to have two copies of Windows installed on the same machine. Windows wasn't designed to exist side by side with another version (AFAIK, its even against the license agreement). Its far, far too messy to bother with. If you must use Home, consider getting either a second machine to run it on, or a copy of a virtual machine to run it under.

SouperComputer

OK, to ignore your question, first of all..... Why do you need to dual doot?


To answer your question, it depends on the application. Many programs these days install registry entires. As a result will not run from another instance of OS. You can be pretty sure that 80% of your apps wont like it. Some games may work, but its hit and miss. YOu may even de-activate some games\apps by trying to run them from an OS environment that they were not originally installed on.

Of course you will need to install each OS on a seperate partition, otherwise things will go aweful pear-shaped!

aidan walsh wrote:

Windows wasn't designed to exist side by side with another version (AFAIK, its even against the license agreement

Thats not true on both counts, if it was, we wouldnt have a boot.ini file If you have a licence for the OS that can be used on the machine then you are legit.

Again, be sure to install on different partitions.

At one stage I had DOS, 95, 98, 2k & RHL all on the same drive without any issues.

SwampThing

Get on bended knee, ask the good Mod to delete this thread and let us not speak of such horrors ever again. Amen.

mordeith

Thanks for the replies.
Well I don't actually need to run in dual-boot. It was just something I was going to try. And you needn't worry, there was no way I was going to do it on the same partition.
So if a Windows dual boot is dodgy (and probably pointless) is it worth my time trying Linux as a secondary OS, or should I try running it off those CDs you can get (Knoppix I think). I'd really only be doing it for my own curiousity as I see a lot poeple say good things about Linux.

SouperComputer

knoppix is good alright, but installing it to HD does no harm if you want to learn more.

SwampThing

Depending on how much you're going to use the second OS, maybe virtualisation is the way to go - you're not interfering with with you're current install and you can try as many OS's as your system can take, resource wise. Beauty is, you will have access to more than one OS at the same time - you're not powering down or rebooting to get to another OS.

Have a look at some of the threads from yesterday about VMWare and have a look at their website - it's going to be free soon enough, if not already.

KerranJast

It's pretty straightforward dual or multibooting a PC. Why the hell though would you want a dual boot of XP Home and XP Pro? Pro is a much better OS. Dump the Home and stick with that. I've a dual boot of Win98Se and XP Pro. Works grand. I was going to put in Red Hat Linux too but just couldn't be bothered. You won't be able to run programs installed in the other OS if you are running the second OS though (the registry will be hidden). You can access the files though if the file systems of the partitions match eg if you've Win98 and XP dual booted, to be able to get at the XP files from Win98 you've to install XP as Fat32 as Win98 doesn't support NTFS.

SouperComputer

kerranJast wrote:

Pro is a much better OS

Not really, its the same OS with less features cut out. Most noteably file encryption and the ability to join domains. Its no more reliable and for a home user theres even more pointless services that use resources.

Having a FAT32 "storage" partition is a good idea though. That way you can reliably write to it from all OS including linux. Only downside to FAT32 is that is can get VERY upset if it is not unmounted cleanly.

KerranJast

SouperComputer wrote:

Not really, its the same OS with less features cut out. Most noteably file encryption and the ability to join domains. Its no more reliable and for a home user theres even more pointless services that use resources.

Having a FAT32 "storage" partition is a good idea though. That way you can reliably write to it from all OS including linux. Only downside to FAT32 is that is can get VERY upset if it is not unmounted cleanly.

Yeah I suppose Home & Pro and pretty much the same underneath, it's just that you have much more control over Pro than Home which is like Fisher Price computing. Plus you can disable any unwanted services. I've never had an XP blue screen with Pro whereas I did get a good few with Home.

esskay

I love playing with OS's, but if you have a home pc not requiring logon to a server and you mainly use it for games,XP Home is the best bet. I started with 2003 server machine and it ran games ok but was a bit sluggish. Next I had XP Pro, same as 2003 server but faster, then I installed XP home and it is the fastest (doesn't use as much resources) of them all. I you have XP pro already just turn off some the networking services to increase performance. http://majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=12 gives a great list of what services you can fine tune. You really have no need to have Home and Pro same PC (unless you are doing programming, Visual studio and other developer software won't run on XP Home).

mordeith

I installed XP Pro (on a trial basis) because initially I though it was more stable. Also the activation is about to run out, so I though I'd ask before I went out and bought a copy (current one is borrowed). I reckon I'll just reinstall my own copy of XP Home and reactivate it. I never had problems with it before so I reckon I'll stick with it and maybe try a few disc-based OS to play around with. Thanks for all the advice guys

CyberGhost

I've tried dual booting 2 win xp pros, but one would always screw up, especially after sp2 install. I would not recommend it.