Win XP Pro->Win 7 64 Dual Boot Questions

tonylong wrote in post #12392943
Oh, and any quick easy answer on the system requirements for supporting SSD?

Just need a sata port on the motherboard and a free power connector.

Some of the newer drives are based on SATA 6 but they will still work on SATA 3 but will take a small performance hit.

tonylong wrote in post #12392929
As far as the Win7 Setup freezeup, are you talking about the initial installation?

Yes, after the "install started" but before any user input.

It just looks like any other SATA hard drive to the BIOS. I have these ones, they work well. My Win7-64 disk is at 30GB, including a full OS install, Office, Photoshop, Bridge, and all sorts of other programs and utilities. 60GB is plenty big enough for an OS SSD. I have another SSD for cache etc.

*sigh* wrote in post #12393004
Just need a sata port on the motherboard and a free power connector.

Some of the newer drives are based on SATA 6 but they will still work on SATA 3 but will take a small performance hit.

Ah, OK, I'll have to dig harder to find my MB doc!

tim wrote in post #12393006
Yes, after the "install started" but before any user input.

It just looks like any other SATA hard drive to the BIOS. I have these ones, they work well. My Win7-64 disk is at 30GB, including a full OS install, Office, Photoshop, Bridge, and all sorts of other programs and utilities. 60GB is plenty big enough for an OS SSD. I have another SSD for cache etc.

Ah, OK!

Thanks loads guys, I'm collecting info...must make an informed choice!

You'll hit problems if your XP install was done with the hard drive in IDE mode, but you want to use the SSD in AHCI mode. If you switch the system to AHCI then XP will likely not work any more, and converting the existing XP install to work with AHCI requires serious hacking (I never managed it). Depending on the motherboard, you may be able to keep some SATA connectors in IDE mode while switching others to AHCI, but probably not

If you don't want to switch OS very often, you could change the setting in the BIOS each time you boot to a different version of Windows. Not ideal, of course.

What are you hoping to achieve by upgrading? If it is only for look and feel I wouldn't bother.

I have upgraded a few computers like this and it is always a frustrating and time consuming process. My rule now is to leave the OS alone until it dies. I use XP, Vista and W7 and it really doesn't make that much difference. The software is a much bigger deal.

Of course if you are committed to the upgrade then best of luck.

tonylong wrote in post #12392386
Hey All!

I've been poking around the Microsoft Web site trying to piece together some precise info on this but haven't gotten it all straight to I thought that I'd toss this out to the "POTN Geek Squad" and see if anyone has tackled this project.

I have an XP Professional workstation/OS. I've been told that it is readily compatible with Win7 64, and I've been contemplating the "move" for some time (I have a laptop that happily is running Win7 64), but the machine is so loaded with software of various vintages that I'm assuming issues. Of course the initial issue for a Win7 64 install will be that it will need to wipe the XP system out in order to do the install and that I'll have to re-install all my programs and some will likely have to run in the 32-bit environment.

Well, I don't think I want to do that quite yet, since I really want my install of Photoshop CS3 and LR1 and other apps to be intact.

So, what I'm thinking is to pick up a fresh disk drive (my system supports SATA but I know nothing about SSD support -- I'm taking my time here before jumping) and then installing Win7 on the clean drive and setting up a dual boot setup and working with that until I'm happy with the way things are going -- I have LR3 happily running in my 64-bit laptop so I know that'll be pain-free at least!

So, questions:

Has anyone here done this, and is there a straightforward approach to installing/setting up a dual boot system on two internal drives? In all the years of working with PCs I've never bothered with a dual boot system...

Second, can you get Win7 64 for the "upgrade" price and still take this approach? Will it just be a matter of entering the XP serial number?

Third, well, any "gotchas"?

Feel free to post a link if you have one on hand!

Thanks, gang!

Microsoft actually takes care of this issue. If you install a new drive in your XP machine and install Windows 7 on it, it should maintain your old system on its current drive, and install a new boot manager along with W7. When you reboot the new system, you need to boot it from the original boot drive. THe boot manager will ask if you want to boot Windows 7 or "Previous Windows Operating Systems" (or something like that). If you select previous OS, it will show you the old Windows systems (in your case XP). If you select W7, it boots that. In either case, you wind up with 3 partitions from the original two. A Windows XP partition, A Windows 7 Partition, and a boot partition. The last is very small and is a for holding the new boot manager.

magwai wrote in post #12395155
What are you hoping to achieve by upgrading? If it is only for look and feel I wouldn't bother.

I have upgraded a few computers like this and it is always a frustrating and time consuming process. My rule now is to leave the OS alone until it dies. I use XP, Vista and W7 and it really doesn't make that much difference. The software is a much bigger deal.

Of course if you are committed to the upgrade then best of luck.

W7 offers a lot more in terms of performance than just a new look and feel.

First he'll be upgrading to 64bit which is a must when you are running 4GB+ of ram. XP is no longer supported, windows 7 does a much better job of supporting newer hardware, from xp to 7 is a huge upgrade and a very worthwhile one at that.

Win 7 is well worth the upgrade, after the initial learning its much less frustrating to use than XP which is now ancient.

At some point, consider running XP in a virtual machine on somthing like virtualbox which enables you to fire up XP within windows 7 rather than having to shut down and reboot. (Though this is only viable if you don't need all the performance of your machine in XP - ie not for photoshop or games but should be fine with old apps).

Hey all,

I got a few hours of sleep and am catching up!!

Thanks for keeping the input up!

I am pretty settled with XP for the time being -- it does what I need it to and has been for, well, since it was released and stabilize, so a few years.

But, my big interest in moving to Win7 64 is, as has been mentioned, the RAM support -- I have 4 GB installed so I'd like to use it and more. As far as the usability of the OS goes, I use it on my laptop with no issues. But, I do hope that I don't have issues when switching between XP and Win7. I could just go with an IDE drive if that's an issue, but it would be cool to get a snappy SSD drive...

You should be fine for an SSD, if you're computer is running W7 supported hardware then it's relatively new hardware and so it should have SATA ports. If you look in your device manager under IDE ATA controllers or something similar you should see a Serial ATA controller or two.

weeatmice wrote in post #12395875
Win 7 is well worth the upgrade, after the initial learning its much less frustrating to use than XP which is now ancient.

At some point, consider running XP in a virtual machine on somthing like virtualbox which enables you to fire up XP within windows 7 rather than having to shut down and reboot. (Though this is only viable if you don't need all the performance of your machine in XP - ie not for photoshop or games but should be fine with old apps).

I actually like XP better. It's simple and does what I want, and I understand it. Win7 doesn't add anything new that I need, and tries to make things easier for people who aren't good with PCs. That makes it harder for someone who knows what they're doing.

Having said that Win7 is more modern and things like USB and random things just seem to work better. XP predated a lot of technologies and had them hacked/patched in. For example USB card readers work more reliably under Win7 for me, with my order Q6600 based machine.

Interesting about XP USB issues -- USB came out in the Win 98 era, and Win had to get a USB-update to Win 98 SE to handle it, but I was not aware that there were issues since Win 98 -- I was a user and support person for NT, 2K and XP with USB stuff coming out the ears and never heard of a defined issue. Interesting.

I just found USB sometimes went quite slow under XP, even with a new XP install. Win7 seems fine so far.

Hmm, OK. I guess it can slow down for whatever reason, especially if there is any port sharing going on -- I know firewire is more robust in that sense. I'd be curious about seeing how Win7 has improved -- I haven't gotten around to testing it! I've got so many devices, hubs and such going into my XP machine I wouldn't know where to begin -- I just make sure I have a solid USB 2.0 throughput and that my card reader and important things are up to speed.

Sometimes it just seemed to connect at USB1.1 speeds, not USB2.0. It could just be weird hardware or setup or something, but Win7 seems fine