For all those that say they hate Vista - run XP at the same time

[Omaroo]

While it seems that it may not suit the personal feelings of a lot of people, computer manufacturers are now incessantly moving towards shipping machines with Vista pre-loaded. This doesn't worry me one bit, but for some it does.

The answer - run Vista for all day to day stuff such as internet access and email. Also use it for applications you know work extremely well on it such as Photoshop and such. For those apps which you've found require specific XP drivers to control hardware devices that seem only to work under XP..... then run XP AS WELL - at the same time.

I have just downloaded Sun's "VirtualBox" - a FREE virtual host application which allows you to run any Intel-specific operating system on your machine alongside Vista.... such as XP or Linux. I have a 2GHz machine with 1Gb of RAM, so it's no powerhouse, but it seems to run very well with the two operating systems running simultaneously.

At this very moment I'm running on my Vista box the following:

Thunderbird mail
Firefox 3 browser (3 windows with 8 tabs each)
Photoshop CS3
Sun VirtualBox with an instance of XP Home edition running IE6

The machine is still very usable, with hardly any performance hit at all. OK - it's not as spritely as it is without a virtual machine running, but it's still very quick.

Installation and setup is a BREEZE. Install the program, create a "virtual" disk via the menus, enable its access to your systems DVD drive, pop your old XP disk in and select "start". It starts the XP installation in its own sizable window and hey, presto! You're running XP alongside Vista at the same time - just like yo'd run any other app. The disk space allocated to any virtual machine can be fixed or left dynamic - so it grows as you need it to.

I acknowledge that there have been many other virtual host applications out over the years (VirtualPC being one), but this one is totally FREE and runs extremely well. It's also the easiest to setup by FAR.

So - you can buy your new machine running Vista - and simply load XP to run when you want to. If you go outside and want to run K3CCD or PHD Guiding with that old webcam, then fire up XP and go for it. It works!

You can get VirtualBox from http://www.virtualbox.org.

Depending on your machine (and the way Vista is installed), get the 32 or 64-bit version.

Have fun! I am - and I'm just installing Fedora Core 9 onto another virtual disk so that I can run Vista and Linux simultaneously - without having to dual-boot into one or the other. Very nice! :)

[allan gould]

Well what a silly idea to run Vista and XP at the same time. I might as well go for DOS5.5 and Windows 2000. Vista just sucks with its peurile questioning about whether you really want to do something or not. Keep questioning a child when its trying to do something and it will just give up. Maybe I'm a child but Vista on my machine with 2Gb RAM was OK but XP is stable and really flies on it. Also I have all the drivers etc for my astro programs and they all run well - Vista just doesnt. Maybe when Vista gets more "mature", less pedantic and stops snooping on whats on my machine etc. then I'll look at it again but for now forget it.

[RB]

No thanks, I'll stick with XP as long as I want/can.

I don't like being forced (by the manufacturer) to take up the latest, especially if, in my eyes, it's inferior to what I have running atm.

I have considered a dual boot scenario, but decided not to.

[Omaroo]

LOL! Not a silly idea AT ALL. Allan - what you fail to realise is that many machines coming off the production line now CANNOT run XP natively. They are BUILT to run Vista and that's it. What I'm suggesting (silly me!! :rolleyes: ) is that for those people who will eventually have to buy a machine like this (or be given one through work or whatever) there is a way they can have their cake and eat it too. They can run Vista (because they have to (oh dear!!) AND run a virtual copy of their favourite XP at the same time, which will allow them to run that very XP-specific bit of hardware or software until the manufacturer of that item gets off their bum and fixes it to work under the new OS. I run my machine for work OTHER than astonomy-specific more than 95% of the time - so being able to run XP when I want for an evening is fantastic.

There are plenty of reasons to do this Allan - if you can't peronally see one, then it's not your place to knock those that do. Shoot Microsoft - not me!

[Omaroo]

That's not the point Andrew. The point is that I bought a new Toshiba laptop the other day that physically can't be made to run XP on its own. The firmware requires Vista to run and that's it. It's OK for you who has an older machine that you were able to wipe Vista from - but for me I can now run XP as well where I couldn't at all before...and simultaneously too - no "dual boot" required anymore. That's old hat.

[Tandum]

Go to Control Panel / User Accounts and "Turn User Account Control Off". You then get a warning that it is turned off when you boot, but those annoying popups are gone forever :D

[Omaroo]

First thing I did. Never been a problem, or annoyance since. :)

There are a HUGE number of options in Vista to turn all sorts of stuff on or off depending on your taste. If people gave it a little time and explored these options they'd realise it isn't as "nasty" as they thought.

[vindictive666]

i personally wouldnt worry about vista et all

coz they are allready working on vista's replacement :)

[Omaroo]

Very late 2009, most likely mid-2010.

[allan gould]

What a wacky world. Are you telling me that the new laptops are built to run Vista only. Then how about running Lunix on them if you DONT like Microsoft?. Get real the customer decides and Im a customer that doesnt like the big brother attitude to OS. Microsoft has a lot to learn about customer relations and programming. Their software is bloated, intrusive and not user friendly as they keep changing the interface so often that you cant find in Word or someother piece of software where to italisize, change margins or backgrounds, delete comments etc etc. How many times have I come back to my PC and found that there is a littler message that says my computer has just rebooted as it downloaded another CRITICAL update and didnt save the bloody work I was writing.
Defend them if you will but this customer and many others think the OS and some of the software sux big time. My opinion but I dont want to know all the nuts and bolts of my PC and its OS I just want to be productive with it and not be snooped on when I connect to the internet or asked all the time if I want to do things. My choice.
Rant off! Have a nice day.

[RB]

Oh OK I'm sorry, my mistake, I was thinking in terms of dual boot.
Well now that is a good option for people with new Vista laptops.

I'm 'lucky enough' if you could call it that, that my laptop was a pre-vista, XP model.
A P4 3.2g that (even has a parallel port) and enough grunt for now to do all my asto work.

I just think it's very unfair what MS is doing, pushing Vista like this when people actually prefer XP.

[allan gould]

Back to the original posting. Its good to see that Sun Microsystems placed this software as freely available and open-sourced for the computing community to use. With over 4 million downloads there obviously is a big need to run different OSs - see http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-02/sunflash.20080212.1.xml
Pity Microsoft wasn't as altruistic. There may be many who love Vista/Microsoft but I bet they either have a vested interest and when I see comments cropping up about this OS in particular most (and I do mean most, dont like it and the way MS have gone about implementing it as well as the way it downloads things "for your benefit/convenience") its saddening.
But then again I support minority views and if you love it, want it and work with it - all power to you. Minorities have inalienable rights too.

[Omaroo]

Allan - I run Windows only because I HAVE to.... and on as few machines as possible.

You make me sound like an MS evangelist - but that's so far from the truth as I avoid MS product wherever I can. I run Macs in the office for our artists, Linux on some desktops, Linux/Unix on all my servers and only run Vista on a couple of machines because I'm a software development manager and need to know that our products will run on the platforms that our customers buy.

New laptops will be manufactured with BIOS/firmware which depends on Vista to run. There are functions and features in the new OS that old hardware won't support any more. Given that, it doesn't mean that you can't still blow it away and run Linux if you prefer - or Solaris... or BSD... or whatever. It just means that the hardware won't still support XP natively, which is a dead system. Sad (to some) but true. It's gone. XP's SP3 is what killed much of the time MS engineers had to work on getting Vista ready because XP was so prone to hackers, virii and bugs that they were re-deployed to fix XP up - again - and quickly.

[allan gould]

Good

[snowyskiesau]

An alternative to the Sun product is VMware's (http://vmware.com) server product.
Also free and easy to install.

[bird]

In fact this product looks exactly like the vmware product, I'd guess it's a licensed version that Sun is rebadging. Even the virtualised devices are identical.

I look after a bunch of servers at work that use VMware to run all sorts of stuff, from Windows Server 2003, XP, Win2k, linux etc all on our HP servers. It works well, but I've never tried to use it for capturing lots of video data via usb.

Me personally, I'll skip Vista thanks :-)

cheers, Bird

[Terry B]

I'd like to use it on an XP machine and run linux on the virtual box. This sound like it would be easier than the dual boot I curently have.

[Omaroo]

Or... run a nice and stable Linux, with its great networking ability and have a virtual XP box running those Windows apps when you need them... It's so nice to have CHOICE hey? :thumbsup:

[turbo_pascale]

Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 is also free....

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/virtualpc/default.mspx

[dugnsuz]

Interesting!! I didn't know this. I have been planning to reinstall XP on my Acer desktop currently running Vista Home Premium.

Now I'm worried - how do I know if my machine will only support Vista? Is there a check?

As discussed here in another thread, these machines don't come with Vista install discs :doh::screwy:. So I might have to purchase both the XP and Vista O/S installation discs - worst case scenario!!!

Doug:thumbsup:

[Zuts]

Hi,

I dont know where all this information is coming from. Any laptop that has a BIOS can run XP.

In fact if you look at the machines being offered by DELL, HP, ASUS etc they are all available with XP as a downgrade option.

Apple Macs dont have a BIOS, they have EFI which is a type of firmware. This is probably a good thing as the BIOS has been with us since the time of the original IBM XT. Vista supports EFI, XP doesnt. Eventually no laptops will be built with BIOS they will all have EFI, currently very few Wintel machines have this.

In any case it is always possible to run a virtual machine. This is the preffered way as Intel includes virtualisation hardware on all new Core 2 CPU's.

Cheers
Paul

[dugnsuz]

Cheers Paul
Vista must go!
It makes me want to punch my monitor - not a good thing!

[Omaroo]

You're probably still OK Doug. From what I've found out, this only applies to some manufacturers lower-end machines coming off the production in very recent times. It'd be nice to know what machines are capable of backgrading to XP if you want.

[Omaroo]

You're mostly right Paul, of course, but there are machines coming out soon with minor hardware upgrades to some internal peripherals (sound hardware and video mainly) which will not have drivers available for them under XP - ever. You MUST run Vista to drive them. Doesn't mean they won't run - but they'll run "hobbled" in some way.

An example is the Fujitsu tablet PC my business partner just purchased. I back-dated it to XP and then there was no sound, and the stylus didn't support variable pressure any more. I put Vista back on and presto - it all works again.

[allan gould]

Well finally took the plunge and purged Vista, XP and the lot. I'm happily running Ubantu 8.04 and I doubt I'll go back.
Regards, Allan

[DJDD]

if only linux/mac would run BF2142, TF2 and other graphics intensive games... :)

the VMWare option is the best one and teh performance hit is not that big, really.

[Tandum]

It's not strickly correct that some machines are vista only. New machines use AHCI to talk to hard drives and this is an additional driver in xp, not native, so you'd need a floppy disk with the drivers and a floppy drive to read it when you install. You may be able to change it from AHCI to IDE in bios, depends on the machine, but AHCI is faster. I have not seen one which you couldn't change.

[Omaroo]

The machines will all run - but some peripherals are now being released that won't support XP any more - read a few posts back.

[tornado33]

Thanks for letting us know about this Chris. I will soon be using a Vista 64 bit machine I plan to build soon. It has to be Vista 64 because I will be using more then 4gb ram. 32 bit O/S's can only use about 3.5gb of ram, so for the odd thing that might not run under Vista64 Id be happy to run XP as well.
Scott

[Omaroo]

Another very valid use for it Scott. Let us know how you go! :thumbsup:

[mojo]

It is very good! I stumbled across VirtualBox after I installed VMWare and it crashed on installation. I've used VMWare before and it is great but crashing while it was installing itself was a bit much to take :rolleyes:

The VirtualBox open source version comes packaged with many Linux distributions but has no USB support. Sun's does. I used Sun's version to reverse engineer a USB Windows driver a while back and it's perfect. USB works totally transparently as far as the guest operating system is concerned. Streams video in the Windows guest on a Linux host without a problem. Surprisingly good.

[tornado33]

Just to try it out I installed it on my laptop and then used it to install a 2nd XP on it, easy to set up and use. I have the 2nd XP installed and running, each is sharing the 2 gb ram with 1 gb each
Scott

[Omaroo]

Good stuff Scott! How are you finding relative performance? I almost couldn't tell that a secondary system was running! The machine just churned away at its normal speed as usual.

[Satchmo]

My only comment , having just installed Vista Premium for a Media Center PC is that it is a memory hog. The PC with 1gb memory is running very sluggishly indeed. If I had a larger hard disc I would now have considered a dual boot machine...

Media Center is something of a disapointment. It doesn't record or dislpay video in HD and there is no free Australian program guide to make recording schedualing easy. The crappy VCR program that came with my HD Tuner card is starting to look pretty nifty :)

[monoxide]

i have to disagree, those 'built for vista' stickers and the like you see are just marketing which is supposed to make the average person think its a better system, you could run whatever you like on it if you do a clean install.
but yeh, those stickers and hype are just to let you know that particular system is 100% compatible with vista as it WILL not run on some hardware, i had to update my bios on my old mainboard as the installer kept crashing for example.

first thing i did when i got my 'built for vista' laptop was get rid of it and put xp on.

unless of course you buy some heap of junk that wont let you in the bios or boot from cd but i havent seen anything like that for years now (the old compaq's)

dont believe for a second that you HAVE to run vista because you dont.
those issues you mention are probably caused by missing drivers which can be found on the manufacturers website and if it works with vista, it will definately work with xp

[Omaroo]

Our tablet PC has a couple of internal devices that are not supported by XP as I stated earlier. As menial as they are (tablet pens pressure control and sound) they did not work under XP and we could not find drivers for them. Admittedly, this is an exception to the rule still.

Hey all - I get the feeling that I'm being attacked here. All I wanted to do was provide an alternative to those that might want to run XP under Vista if that's easier than blowing a whole machine away. I run Vista and have NO problems, so I really don't care if anyone else does. You guys make it very difficult to post anything on this forum without being blasted for it.

Sorry I tried to help.:rolleyes:

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi

I believe that it is quite probable that many new lap tops may only run under Vista or a similarly structured operating system. The current trend with laptops is to make them smaller, thinner, lighter and longer battery life from smaller batteries. To do this they may need new hardware concepts that are not provided for in the BIOS or BIOS extensions of the common operating systems. Even so I also believe that the differences can be copmpensated for with software. After all BIOS has not supplied all needs for years and all operating systems have some form of BIOS extension in their operating systems. Vista probably has more BIOS extensions to take care of hardware changes.

In any case you can always do what I have done and make a self booting DOS 7 CD with all the utiliies you need to examine the computer. If this disk boots in the computer and looks at all the periferals you have. I would expect that any other OS will also work.

Barry

PS I still hate Vista but I will leave it on my laptop for testing purposes and it is the only computer I have that will run the WWT.

B.

[monoxide]

as long as you can boot from cd you can run whatever you like be it linux or another version of windows.

if you have any doubts try downloading a linux 'live' cd and throw it in the drive, it should boot straight into linux running off the cd

unless there is a microsoft brand computer or laptop out there id highly doubt anything will become 'vista only' but in the future it will be a good idea to run vista as thats the way everything will be moving compatibility wise

basically anything hardware related is done through drivers, the operating system cant really talk directly to the hardware, think of it as the operating system and the hardware speaking different languages, the driver is just there to be a translator to tell the two how to talk to eachother, its just up to the manufacturer how many 'languages' they want their hardware to speak.

[allan gould]

According to the latest APC, Microsoft is facing a large antitrust case for all that "Windows Vista capable" and "Certified for Windows Vista" promos that were carried out in the States in helping Intel get rid of its chips in underpower4ed machine. Now what chip manufacturer is making their chips so that it will now only run Vista.
Talk about oligo-opolies.
When are these smart alecs in their ivory towers going to realise that the customer will baulk at what they are doing and go elsewhere?
You can read more on this issue at www.tinyurl.com/233p6w.
Interesting.

[Tandum]

Not true. You just don't have the correct drivers installed or the drivers don't operate the same in the different systems. Media Center in XP operates differently to Media Center in Vista for example. In vista the volume control on the remote works on any motherboard, in XP, on the same motherboard, is doesn't. This is a driver issue, vista has the newer drivers.

XP is still a fully supported operating system, it's vista that isn't fully supported. Especially 64bit Vista, which is what we need to support huge amounts of ram to process those pictures. iTunes only released a Vista 64 package last month for example, yet it's been here for nearly 2 years.

Each operating system has it's place and it's obvious when you have the wrong operating system doing the wrong thing.

[AlexN]

I've been running Virtual boxes for ages under *nix OS's using VMware.
This is not a new idea, but it is a brilliant way of getting older hardware back into use, or getting those pesky peripherals working under new, somewhat unsupported OS's...