I kinda need advice, urgently, since I have to get this done before tomorrow. My sister has a laptop that came with windows vista, and she needs to run some software that apparently is not compatible with vista, so she wants to partition the drive and install windows XP on the second partition. The question here is what is the recommended solution to this, and what issues are expected from doing this. I'm guessing there could be trouble getting appropriate drivers, and I don't know if it would require reformatting the whole drive... And I don't know if Vista likes dual-booting.

Any help is very well appreciated.

you're going to want to back up all your existing files before a partition, just in case something goes wrong. then grab a livecd of gparted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php) and go to town

Some quick tips:

If you just need to run some light applications, Virtual PC (http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?FamilyID=04d26402-3199-48a3-afa2-2dc0b40a73b6&displaylang=en) and other such might be an easier option.
The only issue is laptop drivers can be very hard to find, so you better check that first before you go to any troubles.
You don't need to reformat the whole drive, just resize it. Takes a while though. Backup anything serious just in case.
Most OS are fine with dual-booting, specially if they're the same type (Windows with Windows, etc). Just make sure you have enough space for both because fumbling with partitions is rather tiring if you don't get it right the first time.
If you're installing XP after Vista, you might get a bootloader (the thing that picks the OS to run) conflict, but it's easy to fix, just google it.


All in all, dual-booting is nothing special, OS will happily work as long as they have room and you don't stick them both in the same partition. Vista & XP is a common setup so you can find a lot of guides online and maybe print the good ones out in case something goes awry.

Thanks. I tried Virtual PC but it told me it was not compatible with my OS, which was Vista Home. So I went with a tutorial I found on google on how to install XP on a Vista computer. The XP install isn't quite complete, as I haven't found the drivers for plenty of stuff, but my sister claims she don't need most of it, just needs to run that piece of software and have internet access, which it has now. Problem solved. :cool:

Thanks. I tried Virtual PC but it told me it was not compatible with my OS, which was Vista Home.

Ah, well, this is a bit late, but if I remember rightly you can just ignore that message and it still works fine.