Thread: Dual boot, vista-W7RC

you download it, burn it to dvd and install from it

havent dual booted it, i have it on a separate drive.

I am running it as my 'production' client (even though it is build 7068 and classified as an Evaluation Copy), and have been extremely impressed with its stability and speed. Faster and 'snappier' than Vista (which I know is not saying a lot).

Installed with a few apps (Office, etc - the normal client bits and pieces) it is taking up 19GB.

Haven't tried dual booting. Didn't want to take a chance of messing up my 'real' production machine, so just installed to another drive.

I am surprised you can still download it. I thought they cut that off a couple of months ago.

I'm running a 3 boot option on my laptop at the moment, XP, Vista, or 7RC. My laptop has 2 physical hard drives, I have Vista on one HDD and XP and 7 on the other HDD, which is partitioned. You'd probably want at least 25GB for Win 7, just so you can load the odd application to see if it works.

Cheers,

Tim

Once you have loaded the second OS you will need to repair the Boot Loader, otherwise you won't have the option of which OS you want to boot. I used a program called Easy BCD, very easy to use, and you can change the name of the OS's, (otherwise you get stuck with "older versions of windows" for XP).

Cheers,

Tim

Pedro, Windows 7 RC definitely dual boots smoothly with XP... cant see why Vista would be an issue.

I had the beta dual booting with XP... removed it and installed the 64 bit RC for a while and have since moved to the 32Bit RC with no hassles with my XP build at all. ( I'm running it on my laptop - a Dell Precision M4300)

Spudboy is right, its very smooth and snappy compared to Vista. I'm actually currently using it full time at work (in a 2003 AD) and its behaving perfectly.

Tim, you dont need to use 3rd party tools to play with the bootloader.. BCDedit build itto the os does it all pretty smoothly anyway.

Cheers, Mark

Originally Posted by Bytemrk

... cant see why Vista would be an issue.

I'm sure that's what someone at Microsoft said once too


Seriously though, is it any better than Vista? I understand it is supposed to load faster (wouldn't be hard), but has it still got the terrible interface?

Originally Posted by dm_td5

I'm sure that's what someone at Microsoft said once too


Seriously though, is it any better than Vista? I understand it is supposed to load faster (wouldn't be hard), but has it still got the terrible interface?

It's definitely better than Vista. I tolerated Vista at work for about 6 months before losing it and rolling back to XP.

It has a few little quirks that take some getting used to - but it is still only an RC too.. It's definitely built around the Vista architecture...but most of the annoying things that drove me away from Vista seem to be sorted.

This I am actually enjoying using. Certainly worth a try. I work in a Microsoft based corporate network - so don't have the option to go Mac or Linux. But form what I've found so far I'll keep using it.

Mark

Originally Posted by dm_td5

I'm sure that's what someone at Microsoft said once too


Seriously though, is it any better than Vista? I understand it is supposed to load faster (wouldn't be hard), but has it still got the terrible interface?

I reckon it's a lot better than Vista. I bought a new DELL laptop which came pre-loaded wiht Vista, and I "backloaded' to XP after a week. Slow as all get out.

You have to get used to the new way the Win7 toolbar works, but that only takes a day or two. I'd say it functions more like Vista than XP, so if you don't like Vista you probably won't like Windows 7.

My main machine is running Server 2008, and Win7 is pretty similar (apart from the new toolbar features).