Vista vs XP - Dual Booting

First, let me start by saying I love Vista.  I love the look, I love the search option in the start menu, and I love the added security (read UAC).  For development, Vista seems to work great.  I have never had any issues with it as far as using VS 2005 or 2008.  For VS 2003, I have to run in administrator mode, but that’s not a big deal. Sql Server 2005 runs without issues.  Visual Studio 2008 - no issues.  My antivirus software has no issues.

My only issue with Vista, isn’t really even Vista’s fault.  It’s Dell’s fault.  I own a M1710 XPS laptop.  My video card is an Nvidia GeForce GO 7900 GS.  No matter who I get my video driver from - Microsoft, Nvidia, or Dell, neither of them work very well with many games.  Well, okay, they don’t work with many EA games.  I can run Guild Wars at full graphical awesomitude and have no issues.

EA games seem to have the biggest issues. For instance, Battlefield 1942 would not load any menu controls.  Black and White 2 will randomly BSOD (blue screen of death) and completely crash my machine.  I’ve ruled out heat issues, and every time I call Dell they are more useless than the previous time.  After complaining to Nvidia, they pointed the finger at Dell and said Dell doesn’t play well with the manufacturers drivers because of their chip set. I hate the blame game.

Well, I had learned to cope, until last weekend.  My friends and I get together every few months for 24 hours of pure gaming bliss.  One of our favorite games is - you guessed it - Battlefield 1942.  Unfortunately, I am never able to play (very well) because there is no aiming reticule or any controls to change my options.  This last lan party was the last straw.  I decided to dual boot my system - Vista for my development and work, and XP for my gaming.

I started researching how to go about dual booting and found an article that tells how to dual boot without having to wipe your drive.  I started by cleaning house and backing up everything to my Western Digital Passport drive.  Then, I ran Disk Cleanup, then defrag.  I tried to shrink the partition both using the Vista install disk and by running DISKPART from a command window. (Start -> Run -> type cmd, press CTRL + SHIFT + Enter to run as administrator)  Nothing would shrink the partition, so I tried some third party defragmenting tools.  No luck. All of them would skip some block that would prevent the partition from shrinking past that block.

Finally I decided to try Gparted as recommended by the article.  I started the process when I got home about 5:00.  The next morning it was still running on a drive that is only 93 GB, and I was shrinking the partition size to 46 GB.  I thought surely my battery would last me for the 15 minute drive to work.  I planned to rush in, plug it in and let it continue…I was wrong.  Not 5 minutes after unplugging and leaving the house my battery died.

When I started the thing back up, the partition was ruined.  I now had to reinstall, which wasn’t bad.  I had expected the possibility that I would need to reformat.

I started by installing Vista.  Everything installed with no issues.  All my drivers worked, my Internet worked, everything worked.

Then I installed XP.  I want to note this is Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

For all the praise XP gets, it has some serious issues with hardware that is now over a year old.  First off, it couldn’t find a driver for my Ethernet controller.  I had to boot into Vista, download the driver, then switch back over and install it.  Vista to the rescue.

As if that isn’t the least of my problems…later in the evening I was running through updates on XP.  I could not install any updates and manually had to register several DLL files.  FINALLY, Windows update worked.  But now I had another issue - NO SOUND.  After fighting with Dell and Windows drivers for my HD audio, and even installing the Sound Blaster Audigy application that came with my laptop, I finally had to resort to version tracker to get a working copy of the driver.  Only then did my sound actually work.

Another issue that is brought up in the dual boot instructions is that Vista is now on drive C and XP is on drive E. Any applications that have a hard-coded install path are persona non grata.

So, for all the people who complain that Vista is too buggy, at least it works when I install it. It works with all my IDE’s database software, and even most games.  It may have issues with a few drivers and applications, but at least I can connect to the Internet without needing another PC when I install the OS.  At least I have sound and can update my computer right away.

Vista saved my XP.

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