As a Readifyian, I have a commitment to keeping on the leading edge of Microsoft technologies. This means that I’ll be running Windows Vista beta on my laptop for the next few weeks to understand a bit about how it works.

My goal was to dual boot XP and Vista on the same machine. My first attempt was almost successful, except that I couldn’t boot into XP anymore.

Overview

I backed up everything off my XP installation, then booted the Vista build install DVD. Removed my existing partitions and created two new primary partitions, one for Vista and one for XP. Selected the Vista partition and continued on the install.

There’s no need to babysit the install (this is great!!). After you click “Start”, the installer looks after itself until its booted into Windows and ready to create an initial user.

After an initial user is created, you are logged in and display settings are configured with a wizard (single monitor, dual-monitor, etc).

Install Timings

To get a basic install up and running took about an hour on my hardware. Obviously YMMV and who knows what it will be like in the final release.

• T+0: Boot from DVD
• T+5min: Enter Product Key, Partition Disk, Start installation
• T+6min: “Copying Windows Files”
• T+30min: “Expanding Windows Installation”
• T+50min: Reboot into Windows Vista
• T+60min: Log in as new user

Dual Booting Vista with XP

So once I had Vista up and running, I rebooted and copied my “heres-one-I-prepared-earlier” XP ghost image into the second partition. This was my first mistake. Only XP would boot. So I tried setting the Active partition to the Vista partition and then only Vista would boot, but I had no easy way to switch between them.

After reading some posts online, it appeared that I had to install XP first, then run the Vista install and it would detect it and add it to the boot manager. I tried this and this didn’t work either.

Successfully Dual Booting Vista with XP

The correct way to dual boot Vista with XP is to install XP first, boot into XP and run the Vista custom install from inside XP. The install process will ask for a product key and a partition, then continue just as if you had booted from the DVD.

Improving Explorer performance

To speed up explorer I’ve turned off some of the Visual Effects (Control Panel | System and Maintenance | System | Advanced System Settings | Advanced | Perfomance | Settings…)

Conclusion

I now have a working install of Vista with funky Glass effects that runs fast enough to be usable.