P-7811 XP Dual boot & Driver installation good for P-7805u?

I was given advice to follow the threads for the 7811 for setting up a dual boot with XP 32 on my P-7805u and installing the proper drivers. Is there anything different about the 7805u that I should be worried about?

Here are the threads:

Dual Boot - http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm

Drivers - http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=287180

 

Should be the same. The only thing different about the machines really is the extra 512mb of video ram

 

Looking at this dual boot tutorial:
http://www.bootstrike.com/WindowsVista/dualbootvistaxp.html

In Disk Management, my HD looks like there are already 2 partitions; 1 is unnamed 9.77GB with 100% free (?) and the other is OS (C 288.32 GB with 14% Free.

What is the 9.77GB for and which partition should I shrink to install XP?

 

lol that smiley should be a colon and closed parentheses : ), not

 

that 10GB partition is your recovery partition. Upon getting your laptop you should have made a back up of all needed drivers and your OS following the instructions in your owners manual. Not sure why it would be 100% free, as your recovery should be there

I know

 

Thanks for the help Karmin. I've never done this before and I'm trying to be careful.
I made the Vista backups on DVDs. I didn't think I erased the backup from the HD, yikes! Although if I have the DVDs I don't really see why I need the backup partition. Either way, I suppose I should make a partition for XP on the larger partition. The tutorial recommends 5G for XP, or more if it's going to be the primary OS. What is the difference? I'd rather dedicate enough now, just in case. How much more is required?

 

I used that guide and my XP installation ended up with 2 partitions. When in XP the C: partition has a 200MB capacity that holds the bootloader files, and another partition for the windows folder/program files/documents and settings. This is a huge handicap because anything that NEEDS to be on the C: drive has to be super small, since I have basically no free space for anything. A new SSD is going in next week anyways so I'm just going to install XP first (Works flawlessly) to avoid the complications, hopefully you won't have the same problem.

Why do you need XP (What certain software/games)?

Have you heard of VirtualBox?

You will definitely need more than 5 GB for XP. If you are using the basic windows xp disk, the OS should take up more than 5 GB on it's own (Paging file will be huge). Then it's up to you to decide how much additional space you will need for the programs you want and the files you want to store.