Vista Blog

James writes: I have Vista on my computer and some of my older XP programs won’t even install on Vista, my question is, I heard XP can be run on Vista, so can I have both OSes? Can I like click to run XP and then click back to run Vista?

I’m sorry for not knowing too much about this kind of stuff but it would be helpful if you can teach me anything. I am completely lost as to how to get my older programs to work on Windows Vista.

Thanks, J

No problem James, we are glad to help. As far as I can see you really have a couple options here 1) you can Dual Boot, you would have to select which OS you want to use when you boot up your computer. There is a wonderful step-by-step guide for doing this over at apcmag.com. Here’s a snippet:

We’re going to use the DISKPART on the Vista DVD to shrink the Vista partition on the hard disk and create enough space for an installation of Vista. We’ll then install XP, repair the Vista bootloader which will be overwritten during the XP installation, and then use the EasyBCD utility to configure Vista’s bootloader to boot the XP partition.

2) You can setup your PC to run as a Virtual PC, you can read more about this from Microsoft here or go directly to their download site here.

We hope this answers your question James and please don’t be afraid to ask any questions of us in the future. We have just gotten started and would like to be a favorite amongst those in need of help.

There simply is no such thing as a dumb question as long as someone has the courage to ask it!