blog: windows 7/XP dual boot adventure

[nikos]

here's the comment area for today's blog post found at
http://zabkat.com/blog/24May09-network-cables.htm

[snemarch]

It shouldn't be a big problem getting an USB stick bootable using XP, except I'm not sure if XP has diskpart (and thus a built-in way to mark a partition as active - can't remember if compmgmt.msc has the facility). As for getting a bootsector on it, there's a tool called "bootsect.exe" in the "boot" folder on the Win7 DVD... guess what that does?

Nice that you have a win7 testing platform, even if virtualpc/vmware would probably be more convenient. There's at least one thing that doesn't work for me on Win7, and that's getting the ALT+F1 drivebar displayed.

[fgagnon]

Actually virtualization (& virtualpc in particular) is less convenient unless one has a machine with more resources than nikos describes he has.

As for the non-working Alt+F1 and drive bar issue, it seems there is a fix in the works.  If you are into testing alpha's, try the offering here.

[snemarch]

How slow is his machine? - I ran VMWare already back in the days of a 700MHz Athlon with 512meg ram. Granted, the OSes I virtualized would be linux and win9x on a win2k host (and at least last time I checked, VPC was a good deal slower than vmware), but still. I personally find VMs a lot more convenient because you don't have to shuffle around with several physical machines, and a thing like vmware state snapshots is invaluable. And Win7 isn't really all that resource heavy, especially if you strip it down a bitwith vlite

Thanks for the beta link, I'll check it out later today.

[nikos]

How slow is his machine

it's a netbook i bought for my girlfriend
actually it's proving quite handy now that i'm off-base travelling in slovakia, i hardly miss my main laptop

[snemarch]

Oh, I was referring to your main machine - didn't know you were off-base . For a netbook, virtualization prooobably is a bit too heavy