Dual booting Windows XP

[schi0249]

I was browsing sites looking for Windows XP tweaks. On one site, a guy talked about how he had 2 Windows XP installs on his PC. One was games only and the other was all of the app's. Any idea if this would really boost performance? If so, how much. Also, what would I need to do? I was going to do a clean install of Winodws shortly anyway.

 

[it290]

It might boost performance slightly, if only for the fact that you could keep the gaming install free of extra clutter that you might otherwise need for your apps. The gaming HD/partition will also likely not get fragmented as easily. Of course, it's also a PITA.. I used to dual boot into Windows for gaming and I always found it tedious. But if you want to do it, it's fairly simple. Just install Windows onto a fresh partition and you're good to go. The install will take care of setting up a boot menu for you.

 

[MasterAkumaMatata]

I've seen this done with Windows 2000 too. You can set your BIOS to boot from your CD-ROM drive first. Let's say you already have Windows XP installed. You startup your computer with the Windows XP installation disc inside your CD-ROM drive. During the installation process, it detects that you already have Windows XP installed. It will ask you if you would like to overwrite the current install, or create another Windows XP install on a different partition. When you're done installing the second Windows XP, you can edit the boot.ini file with any text editor (e.g., Notepad) found in your C:\ drive so you can better distinguish which install is which during boot up.

 

[schi0249]

Cool. Thanks everyone. I'm gonna give it a try. I suppose it can't hurt. Then I won't have qicktime and all that crap hidden in the background.

 

[Pearl Jammzz]

I just have all my games ona different HDD parition. It helps a lil bit. I also have a temp partition for my download (10gigs) then a partition for windows/apps which is 10gig. oh ya, and my game partition also has my mp3s stored on it.

 

[Ammut]

When my xp home crashed, I installed XP pro so I could access my stuff. Instead of making a new partition and using partition magic or something like that I simply installed it ontop of the broken one. The install cd sure didn't want me doing that (it came up with numerous warnings when installing) but it worked out fine in the end. Yep, I'm lazy.

 

[Pearl Jammzz]

ack, sumthin I would never do. Glad to hear it worked though 🙂.