Alright, I know it's possible to put both Vista and XP as Operating Systems ion a computer.

What I want to know is if it is possible to put both on a Dell XPS laptop, currently with Vista. 4 Gigs ram, a dual Centrino core, and 250 Gigabytes of hard drive space.

I would really like to know because my dad just got a laptop, and being over fifty -mumble he's used to XP. He'll keep both for when Vista becomes the Windows OS standard, but for now prefers XP more than anything.

Dual booting OSes is usually not a problem but you'll have to be able to repartition your hard drive and you may need the original Vista disc (NOT the system restore discs that they give you) to do that on an OEM machine (I haven't been on a dell in years so I'm not sure what the BIOS is like anymore). They're usually locked down tight when it comes to messing with the boot sector so someone with more recent knowledge of OEM systems is gonna hafta help you here. If it's anything like with a self-built PC then you should just be able to pop in the XP disc, create a new boot partition, and load it up. On startup (after POST) the machine should ask you which OS you want to start. Be sure you create a NEW partition for windows XP during the install process as, if you don't have the ACTUAL OS disc and you delete the VISTA partition, you may not be able to recover VISTA.

EDIT: Corrected the OS order.

You'd have to pretty much re-format your hard drive. but I would advise against it, especially with the machine having vista natively on it. Microsoft stopped signing drivers for XP a while back, so you may have unstable drivers for video, chipset, audio and other stuff.

I know how much everybody hates vista, but you just have to put up with it, or L2Linux

Well, what happened is it's maxed out with partitioning to 4. He can't repartition it because it won't go higher. Thanks for the help.

Yeah I just noticed it's not that easy because of the gimped ntldr script. You can do it without reformats and with a whole lot of trouble (moving around some bootloaders and screening both partitions) but it can be done. There are a few sites with instructions if you google it but read them carefully before you attempt any of them. There may be steps you can't, or don't want to do.

the drive is partitioned into 4 primary partitions apparently. In a perfect world your drive would be formatted into 1 primary partition and then any number of extended partitions.

Well, he might ask out Tech Guy to do it.

superbleeder12:
You'd have to pretty much re-format your hard drive. but I would advise against it, especially with the machine having vista natively on it. Microsoft stopped signing drivers for XP a while back, so you may have unstable drivers for video, chipset, audio and other stuff.

ummm hate to say this but signing drivers doesn't meant it's any more stable than the unsigned ones, it just means they paid m$ some money to say they are signed

as for the original post, most places are NOT going to vista, it's not going to be a standard, most companies and organizations are either sticking with xp or going to linux

He could install XP on a Virtual Machine.