Set up dual boot with XP and windows 7

[markl316]

On my laptop playing orbiter, I get decent framerates--for Vista. In the VC of the XR1 orbiting over Seth Eden's level 10 textures, with 16x anistropic and 16xQ antialiasing, I get around 50--sometimes as high as 60, sometimes as low as 40. I understand this is very good for a laptop with vista, but, in some situations, like when Jupiter is in view with its 40 moons, I get like 20, sometimes 15. If i had windows XP, I could easily get 60+ fps everywhere and anywhere in orbiter, or so i hope.

I tried to get a friend to help me do this, and we got XP dual booted, but...after hours of searching, we couldn't find nvidia video drivers.

My specs are:
Laptop with Vista Home edition.
Intel core 2 duo 2.0 GHz.
4 GB DDR2 RAM.
250 GB HDD.
GeForce GTX 260M.

My questions:
Obviously, I can google a tutorial, pull one up, and set up the dual boot. There are many tutorials out there, which one do people recommend that have done this?

Also, (important) where exactly do i get a copy of windows XP?

Last and probably most important: I have a free upgrade to Windows 7 from when I bought my laptop. Should I get the Windows 7 upgrade first, then partition the hard drive, or can I set up the dual boot (which would make it Vista and XP), and then use the upgrade to replace the Vista portion of my hard drive with Windows 7?

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

Mark

 

[Bj]

My questions:
Obviously, I can google a tutorial, pull one up, and set up the dual boot. There are many tutorials out there, which one do people recommend that have done this?
...
Last and probably most important: I have a free upgrade to Windows 7 from when I bought my laptop. Should I get the Windows 7 upgrade first, then partition the hard drive, or can I set up the dual boot (which would make it Vista and XP), and then use the upgrade to replace the Vista portion of my hard drive with Windows 7?

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

Mark

I actually have a duel install of XP and XP. (One is everyday stuff, the next is a productivity programs, vid, sound, graphic editing ext..) and I just copied the second XP over top my Linux install. The only difference was on grub I saw
XP
XP
side by side and its more difficult to differentiate between the two. You can edit this of course; (In XP) go to system properties -> advanced -> Startup and Recovery -> edit, and change the names of the partitions.


Anyway, to install XP onto a Vista system I would use a partition manager to resize the partition of Vista to half or so, then format the raw space with the XP install disk... but I really don't use a tutorial for this kind-of stuff (that is until it doesn't work ) So Google is your best bet if your lost. My guess is it wouldnot matter if you upgrade to 7 before or after, but since 7 is 'supposedly' better I would do it sooner than later.

Also, (important) where exactly do i get a copy of windows XP?

Try Amazon;

Home
Pro

 

[markl316]

Well I just installed 7...it seems that the framerate in many cases is worse than Vista. And yes, vistaboost is installed and running. Anybody else experiencing this?

---------- Post added at 09:16 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:36 PM ----------

Does anybody know what is wrong? I tried the video drivers off the nvidia and asus websites.