Preparing for the wow
by Richard Corzo

The catch phrase in the Microsoft publicity for Windows Vista and Office 2007 when they arrived on January 29:  “The Wow starts now!“ 

My old PC had died in December and I replaced it with a new Gateway PC that came with Windows XP Media Center Edition and a free upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium Edition. I also bought Microsoft Office 2003 for the new PC and the timing was such that it also came with a free upgrade to Office 2007. I sent in all the required proofs of purchase and finally, right after the DACS general meeting presentation, my upgrades arrived.

I hadn't skimped when I ordered my new PC, so I had 2 GB of memory, a dual core processor, and a graphics video card with 256 MB of memory. I also got a new 24” wide screen LCD monitor. If you want to see if your machine can run Windows Vista, you can run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/upgradeadvisor.mspx). 

While waiting for the new software to arrive I made some preparations to back up and partition my hard drive so that I would be able to dual boot Windows XP and Vista. I bought Acronis True Image Home (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/) to be able to back up my existing XP partition and separate data partition, and bought two FireWire/USB external enclosures to get the data off the drives from my old PC, and then use them as backup drives. (It was my motherboard rather than the hard drives that had died in the old PC, but so many other things needed upgrading I opted to get a whole new machine.)  I also bought Acronis Disk Director Suite (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/) to do the partitioning and it includes Acronis OS selector to allow me to boot any operating systems I install.

The standard advice is that it is better to do a clean install rather than an upgrade install, although that means you will have to reinstall all your applications in the new install partition. I knew it takes time for software and hardware vendors to update their applications and device drivers for a new OS, so I didn't expect that everything would immediately work in the Vista partition. That's why I wanted to leave my XP partition undisturbed while I installed Vista in a separate partition and gradually built it up until one day I could leave XP behind.

If you do a search on “XP Vista dual boot” you will find a number of how-to pages on setting this up. One I liked in particular was “How do I... Install Windows Vista in a dual-boot configuration along with Windows XP?” (http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6157570.html). One thing this particular page mentions is that you don”t have to do the Windows activation during the install. In fact, until you are sure you have Vista installed the way you want it, it may be a good idea to hold off on that.

Apparently, the Windows Vista installation had a little different concept than I did of how it wanted to set things up. Even though I specified Windows Vista to install in the empty partition, the install modified the master boot record and the boot sector on the XP partition so that I was seeing Vista's dual boot screen rather than the Acronis OS Selector. The choices on the Vista dual boot text screen were “Earlier Version of Windows” and “Microsoft Windows Vista.” Even when I tried to restore Acronis OS Selector as my boot selector, I couldn't boot directly into XP without going through this ugly Vista dual boot screen. That's when my Acronis True Image backup came in handy. I could boot from my Acronis Rescue Media CD (be sure to create that before you try to install Vista) and restore the XP image from my external hard drive backup. An image backup can be restored more quickly than a traditional file backup, and without the need to restore the OS first.

Then, I tried again, but this time I booted from the Vista install CD rather than starting the install from Windows XP (or perhaps I made these attempts in the reverse order). I had the same undesirable result of being forced to go through the Vista dual boot screen. So once more I did a restore of the XP partition. I did some more research and found that it would be necessary to completely hide the XP partition from the Vista install, which I could do with the Acronis Disk Director utility. That did the trick and I was finally able to install Vista without disturbing my XP partition. I then made the XP partition visible again and then reinstalled Acronis OS Selector to be my only boot selector. Hallelujah!

I'll report next month on how I like the new Windows Vista.



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