Thinking of dual booting. Help please?

Well, as the title says, I'm thinking of setting my m11x R1 to dual boot Windows 7 and Windows XP. The thing I'm wondering is, would it pretty much be suicide on this laptop?

Seeing as all of the m11x drivers are exclusively for Windows 7 64-Bit, would I be correct in guessing unless someone would create third party applications, I would lose out on my keyboard function commands, as well as my AlienFX lighting/command center features?

If that is the case, it won't even be worth it. I'll need to be able to swap the video cards, and if I cannot, well, the purpose for it - old school gaming - will be defeated.

So any advice would be appreciated. With any other brand I'd try in a heartbeat, but with all the extra features? Definitely not.

 

First of all, why are you wanting to dual boot winxp and win7?

Win7 has the ability for full windows xp emulation. It's only offered starting with windows 7 PROFESSIONAL and beyond. Not in home.

Think about it. There's nothing you can't emulate from the past programs of the 90's and 00's on win7 with this feature.

 

While Windows 7 Pro, Enterprise & Ultimate do have XP Mode, it does not work properly for video cards because it emulates most of your hardware, resulting in not seeing the ATI/nVidia card, but instead an emulated, NON-3D, 4MB-16MB S3 Trio.

Wiki for an example of hardware emulated:
Virtual PC emulates the following environments:

• Intel Pentium II (32-bit) processor (but virtualizes the host processor on Windows versions) with an Intel 440BX chipset.
• Standard SVGA VESA graphics card (S3 Trio 32 PCI with 4 MB video RAM, adjustable in later versions up to 16 MB by manually editing a virtual machine's settings file).
• System BIOS from American Megatrends (AMI).
• Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 ISA PnP. (When Vista is installed as both the host (main) and guest (virtual) operating systems, settings are synchronized with the host and audio configuration is not required.)
• DEC 21041 (DEC 21140 in newer versions) Ethernet network card.
• Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and earlier do not have the ability to redirect USB devices to the guest machine, although devices connected to the host OS via USB can be used as normal by Virtual PC.
• Programs using undocumented features of hardware, exotic timings, or unsupported opcodes may not work.

Google link with many, many more threads about it.

Because of that, many games would only be playable with either something like DOSBox, dualbooting to a real version of XP, or a combination of the two.

Dune 2000 was the first game I experienced having this "non-supported video card" issue while trying to run it.

 

I have the Home edition, and I'm not willing to shell out an ungodly amount for an upgrade that I could do simply enough by dual booting. Also, certain Windows XP themes do look pretty darn nice.

 

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Ya if you are going to do a dual boot. Best suggestion is have the OS you are going to use the Most installed last. Basicly what happens is when you install the frist OS and then install the second one the Second OS becomes the Main OS. I found some OEM Windows 7 Pro for around $138 USA. That might be a better idea. That was from Directron.com

 

You can get Win Pro upgrade for about 60.00 on Amazon.

 

Again, I'm not wanting to shell the monies out for Windows Pro. I was lucky enough to be able to afford this machine. The next time I'll be able to get any sort of spending money that I can spend on anything other than gas and bills will be in December.

Am I correct I would lose AlienFX, the Command Center, and the ability toi swap between the video cards in XP?

 

the only thing you will keep will be switchable graphic i don't have an idea of how it will work in Xp thoug

 

Because if I keep the switchable graphics somehow that could almost make it manageable - the AlienFX Lite might work with XP? Hmmm. Could be worth looking into.

 

You can always try it. If you can not make it work uninstall xp and remove the boot loader. I have dont that with linux, just google it.