Swapping XP and Vista on a Laptop

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Barry

Our computer Club has an aging Sony Vaio laptop with XP Pro.After Windows
Vista is released on January 30, 2007, we will face a dilemma. At some
point, users will be moving toward Vista but many will stick with XP and we
have the obligation to present the old and the new OSs to the membership.

We can either buy a new Premium Ready lzptop with an upgrade coupon or buy a
new laptop with Vista preinstalled. The latter will be more expensive and we
have a limited budget.
My plan is to load the XP and Vista OSs on separate hard drives and swap
them out as reuired. I would remove the screws to the hard drive panel and
swap them if I could find a compatible caddy or frame such as exists in
desktop models which have removable drives.

Do you agree with this or do you foresee major problems? . I would
appreciate
any comments. Happy New Year.

Barry
 
Our computer Club has an aging Sony Vaio laptop with XP Pro.After Windows
Vista is released on January 30, 2007, we will face a dilemma. At some
point, users will be moving toward Vista but many will stick with XP and we
have the obligation to present the old and the new OSs to the membership.

We can either buy a new Premium Ready lzptop with an upgrade coupon or buy a
new laptop with Vista preinstalled. The latter will be more expensive and we
have a limited budget.
My plan is to load the XP and Vista OSs on separate hard drives and swap
them out as reuired. I would remove the screws to the hard drive panel and
swap them if I could find a compatible caddy or frame such as exists in
desktop models which have removable drives.

Do you agree with this or do you foresee major problems? . I would
appreciate
Click to expand...

Good idea. Finding such a caddy may be a problem, Sony doesn't want to
sell those parts separatly in my experience.
 
Barry said:
Our computer Club has an aging Sony Vaio laptop with XP Pro.After Windows
Vista is released on January 30, 2007, we will face a dilemma. At some
point, users will be moving toward Vista but many will stick with XP and we
have the obligation to present the old and the new OSs to the membership.

We can either buy a new Premium Ready lzptop with an upgrade coupon or buy a
new laptop with Vista preinstalled. The latter will be more expensive and we
have a limited budget.
My plan is to load the XP and Vista OSs on separate hard drives and swap
them out as reuired. I would remove the screws to the hard drive panel and
swap them if I could find a compatible caddy or frame such as exists in
desktop models which have removable drives.

Do you agree with this or do you foresee major problems? . I would
appreciate
any comments. Happy New Year.
Click to expand...

Barry:

If you buy a computer with XP installed and a Vista upgrade coupon, you
are not licensed to use both OS's simultaneously. It has always been
this way with upgrades.

You should also read the many posts in this group about the upgrade
process from XP to Vista -- it will be different from previous upgrades,
and not nearly so convenient, especially if you need to reinstall.

David Wilkinson
 
Barry:

My personal suggestion would be to have a
large HD in the current laptop and have two
partitions on this drive.
Partition (c:) would have XP on it.
Format the other partition (copying c:) to
d: during the partition/format.
This gives you XP on C: & D:
(Boot to C:) Install Vista on C: (there is an
option to format c: drive before installation, if needed).
This should give you a dual boot scenerio.
I have done it with a desktop computer (just a
little bit differently) so it should work with a
reasonable size HD in a laptop.
Of course, your laptop has to be Vista ready !

More suggestions will, I am sure, come your way.

Best wishes to the club for 2007

.............................................................
 
When you say "aging" whats the spec of the Vaio? Does it meet the
requirements of Vista (and not just the minimum requirements)? I'm guessing
you would want to show off the full Vista experience.

You could always go for the brand spanking new laptop and run XP in Virtual
PC, but as you said you are on a budget.

Luke
 
If you buy a new laptop with Vista won't you still have the Sony with XP?
If so, what is the problem? It will cost no more to buy a new laptop with
Vista preinstalled than to buy it with XP preinstalled and an upgrade coupon
for Vista. Since you will not be able to use the XP on the new laptop after
ugrading to Vista I think you need to keep the old laptop around too. If it
were me I wouldn't spend anything on a new machine or Vista. I would
continue to use the old one and let the first member who buys a Vista
machine bring it to the meetings and show it off.
 
I have a Sony Vaio desktop and a Dell laptop. I am running Vista RC1 on both.
For the Laptop I did a clean install and totally replaced XP.

The interesting thing on the Vaio is that I like you wondered whether to do
two seprate drives or dual boot. I went with 2 seprate drives. I moved my XP
drive to the slave position and a new blank drive in primary. Then did a
clean Vista install on the primary. But here is the interesting part, I don't
need to swap the drives or go into the BIOS to switch boot drives. Set the
Vista drive (primary) as the boot drive. I get a prompt at boot that asks do
I want to load Vista (default with count down timer running) or Older version
of Windows.

Both seem to work fine.
 
Barry said:
Our computer Club has an aging Sony Vaio laptop with XP Pro.After Windows
Vista is released on January 30, 2007, we will face a dilemma. At some
point, users will be moving toward Vista but many will stick with XP and
we
have the obligation to present the old and the new OSs to the membership.

We can either buy a new Premium Ready lzptop with an upgrade coupon or buy
a
new laptop with Vista preinstalled. The latter will be more expensive and
we
have a limited budget.
My plan is to load the XP and Vista OSs on separate hard drives and swap
them out as reuired. I would remove the screws to the hard drive panel and
swap them if I could find a compatible caddy or frame such as exists in
desktop models which have removable drives.

Do you agree with this or do you foresee major problems? . I would
appreciate
any comments. Happy New Year.
Click to expand...

I've done this three different ways:

Scenario 1: Format existing 80 gig hard drive in to two 40 gig partitions
and install XP on one partition and Vista on the other in a dual boot
set-up. You can choose which you would like to boot at start up.
Disadvantage is that you need a decent sized primary hard drive and lack of
hard drive space seems to become an issue.

Scenario 2: As you mentioned, swapping out hard drives, one with XP the
other with Vista. Works great but switching the drives takes some time and
connectors within a laptop aren't really designed for constant swapping of
the primary drive.

Scenario 3: Install Vista on the hard drive of the laptop then install MS
VPC 2007 (free) then install and run Windows XP in a virtual machine on the
Vista PC. Virtual machines can be stored on a USB 2 drive if hard drive
space is an issue.

All three scenarios will work but the one I prefer is #3 and it is the one I
am using presently on a ThinkPad T43. The laptop is running Vista RC1 and
then I have Virtual Machines with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows NT, SLED
10 and Ubuntu. I have found that performance in running Windows XP in a
virtual machine is fine but your mileage may vary depending on what you plan
to run or demo on the XP virtual PC platform.

If you have a prior version of Windows around I would suggest downloading
and installing VPC 2007 then installing the earlier version of Windows into
a virtual machine on the Viao to test out performance. Assuming you have an
earlier license and version of Windows not in use it is a no cost way of
testing out the virtual machine technology. You can also get trial versions
of VMWare to test out. MS VPC 2007 seems to work great with versions of
Windows but if you plan to also run Linux from within a virtual machine I
have found VMWare to be more up to the task.
 
One question, you say its an ageing laptop - have you run the upgrade
advisor to see if it will run Vista? because that may make the decision for
you.
 
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