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Question : The BEST Way to Dual Boot & Ultility to Help with Registry Entries
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I had a semi-successful dual boot configured with XP SP2 as the default & Vista Business (upgrade) as a start-up option (through menu after BIOS, not F8 or whatever). Vista would take a ridiculously long time to start up--6 minutes or so--& XP would also take longer than normal to boot.
I have pretty much state-of the-art hardware: a Velocity Micro with a new mobo (eVGA nForce 680i SLI "Black Pearl") which replaced a seriously problematic Intel "Bad Axe II", 2GB Corsair Dominator 1077 memory (800 in usage), eVGA 8800 GTX video card, Intel Dual Core Quad (original 800, not newer 850), 4 internal drives (WD 150 GB Raptor (primary, XP), WD 250GB SATA, WD 74 GB Raptor & Seagate 320 GB perpendicular SATA (Vista drive), no RAID, no overclocking--games & graphics used, but stability for both Office 2003 (XP S&T edition) & 2007 Pro (Vista drive) is more important to me than squeezing extra FPS for gaming etc.
OK, the gist: in the process of swapping the mobo, the C: (Raptor 150) was reformatted, & I'm looking for advice for the best dual-boot solution: virtual machine I assume is safest, but presumably you take a performance hit, supposedly WinPatrol (whatever the latest version is) helps with boot time by delaying non-essential services from pre-loading), know the bit about installing the Vista upgrade 1st without entering license etc., not sure if Ultimate upgrade will work on more than machine, so any suggestion for the myriad ways of setting up a stable, reasonably fast boot scheme would very much be appreciated--and yes, back-up everything up 20 ways to Sunday before trying (Acronis 10 seems to help, EMC Retrospect 7.5 was a disaster of corrupted MBR, boot.ini, boot store (whatever the Vista system uses to take control of the whole process). Used Easy BCD, but I think, Vista Boot (?) was better freeware.
Will waste $ if necessary, as in buying the cheapest Vista Home (not upgrade) if this helps, & then upgrading (hopefully) to Ultimate), I have a 4GB & 8GB A-Data USB drives (thanks to whoever informed me that 4 GB is the max) that more than meet ReadyBoost speed requirements. But there's almost too much out there on ways to set this up: so advice on the presumably optimal way to do this, with the best piker software to help configure, would very much be appreciated.
Thanks for any help you can offer.
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Answer : The BEST Way to Dual Boot & Ultility to Help with Registry Entries
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A bit "geeky" to learn and use, but far-and-away the best partition manager, boot manager, imaging utility I've found is Boot-It NG. It DOES take a bit to set up correctly, but it's very inexpensive (~$35), and lets you set up a simple "Image Now!" icon on each OS, so you can take system partition images very easily.
... and you can try it for free. It won't support "Boot Now" ==> the feature that enables the "Image Now" icon, and that also allows you to put a "Boot XX" icon on each desktop --> i.e. you can have a "Boot Vista" icon on your XP desktop & vice-versa ... so a simple double-click reboots to whatever OS you want. I have one system with about a dozen OS's and can boot to whatever I want with a double-click.
Virtualization is another way to have multiple OS's => and has the advantage that they can all be running at once [the Virtual OS simply runs in a Windows within the host]. I also use these ... with both Virtual PC and VMWare Server ... but as you've correctly noted, there is a bit of a performance hit. The ability to switch OS's instantly is nice --> I'll often do that to answer a question on EE, for example, but the full-speed OS on my multi-boot system is always preferable for "real work."
I would download Boot-It from www.bootitng.com and give it a try. If you like it, buy it and the added Image Sets and BootNow! support will let you set things up very nicely. But as I noted, it's got a bit of a learning curve. Read the manual & perhaps look at a few of the video tutorials on their website: http://www.bootitng.com/examples.html
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