AlbertLionheart said:
I have to support people with it as well as XP so am about to embark on a dual boot system using XP Pro SPII and Vista 64bit. If it is raining it will get done this weekend.
Be careful. It is supposed to be hard to do (according to various forums), but I had no trouble whatsoever adding Vista to a XP rig. I added another physical drive, installed Vista on it, and it went like a breeze.
After a few months I decided that I will never use the XP drive, and decided to remove it. When Vista is added, it thinks that it is the only operating system, and when the MBR is built, it adds the other drive in the booting process. Vista considers its own drive C:, but the BIOS considers the XP drive the primary drive. When booting on a dual-boot with Vista, you get a screen in the boot process that asks whether you want to boot Vista, or "older Windows operating system.
After a lot of googling and trying several fixes, I found out that you (probably) can take the boot file that Vista added to the other drive and merely copy it on the Vista drive. I don't know for sure, because one of the "fixes" was to delete everything from the XP drive. Well, I also deleted the particular boot file.
So I have a blank hard drive sitting in my other rig that I don't use. Yes, a clean install will fix all. Its getting close to time for a clean install on that rig, so I guess I'll have an extra drive soon.
There are supposedly a different set of problems adding XP to a Vista rig,
I've been using Vista Home Premium 64-bit on my main rig for about nine months. I really don't see it better or worse than XP, its an operating system. I haven't had any driver support problems, and have only found a couple of programs that won't work on it...and a couple of others that don't work correctly.
I've had Vista Ultimate 32-bit on my DDR3 test rig for 5 or six months, and changed it to Ultimate 64-bit this weekend, I got a 4 gig DDR3 kit to test. So far, I see no real benefits to Ultimate over Home Premium, nothing like the difference between XP Home and XP Pro. I really haven't had a lot of opportunity to use the test rig long term, as I do a clean install whenever I test a new motherboard, so it really hasn't been installed more than two or three weeks at a time.
I guess the only real problems I've had with Vista is trying to install Catalyst drivers. Vista will always try to install drivers, and will install generic drivers if it can't find the real ones. It nearly always finds the correct latest drivers online. It can't find the Catalyst drivers, and even while you are installing them, it installs the generic ones...it is kind of a race to see which ones will be installed first. It usually takes two or three tries to get the drivers and Catalyst suite installed. (I've had less trouble by downloading the Catalyst drivers separate from the CCC, and install them separately)