Setting up a dual boot with Win7/XP

[Zoyous]

Well, going by VC&G's rule of 10 years defining vintage, I thought I'd ask this here.  I have one application that's essential to me that requires XP to run... I've grappled with getting it running in Vista and Win7 and it's just not happening.  Can anyone give instructions, or direct me to a guide, for creating a partition on an existing Win7 install, installing XP on it, and then setting it up to offer an option to boot either one on startup?

[sirpaul484]

To be honest, I have had many issues with partitioning in the past, some of which so bad that I now steer people away from that route.  I personally would recommend instead to install Windows XP on a virtual machine using VMWare (http://www.vmware.com/products/player/overview.html).  It would allow you to run Windows XP on top of Windows 7.. Or any other operating system that runs on x86 architecture.  Of course, you'd need a powerful enough machine to do so.  If it was built within the last year or two, and has more than one core and at least 4 gigs of ram, it should be fine.

[t3hfr3ak]

You could always just grab a small 320gb hd and install XP on there and throw that in the computer. there are tutorials online everywhere that can help you with the dual-boot selection screen. In fact, I am pretty sure Windows 7 automatically creates the dualboot screen if it detects more than one operating system on the computer.

[Zoyous]

Thanks for the recommendations.  In this case I'm actually going to be doing this with a laptop so I think I'll try the virtual machine method.  For some reason the concept of a virtual machine has always intimidated me a bit, but what better reason to dive in and experience it!  I'm a weird mixture of very advanced with certain computing applications and very inexperienced with others.