tz160-dualbooting question

Ok, mine came with the Vista. Just recently, I came back from a visit from CA that had a Sony store. He made me a "downgrade" dvd to XP. My main complaint is how much loading there is on the little computer which slows down the statup and some programs.
The Sony guy said this is the restore CD to XP, so it'll erase everything on the harddrive. Is it possible to dualboot with the vista on the computer and the Sony XP restore cd? How would I get something like that started?
I have 2GB of ram now and I'm even trying to use a 4gb sony memory stick for ramboost for some help.

 

the xp downgrade cd will wipe out your entire hard drive. there is no way to get around what it wants to do.

in order to dual boot, you'd have to have an actual install cd or dvd of each operating system.
OR
you could get creative and backup the existing hard drive with vista on it, downgrade to xp, run a partition resizing program, and then restore your original backup to the free space. this wouldn't be simple, though. and then you'd have to configure one of the partitions as active, and configure the bootloader to allow you to choose what partition you want to boot.

 

that is correct you can not use the restore cd because of a image of the entire hard drive so you can not put it on a partition. Right now Im tribooting my TZ150 with Unbuntu 64, Windows XP, and Vista all clean installs with no bloatware

 

Is it really that much better (xp) on this notebook? I mean, besides the load times on startup/sleep/etc I don't mind Vista. Is it worth the trouble?

 

Not really. I love Vista...Don't know why so many people have issues with it. My TZ150 cold boots in 40 seconds, even with Vista SP1. The only complaint I have is that Vista takes up quite a bit of space. The XP downgrade disk Sony sent me was not good; a lot of bloatware and icons in the system tray. I would not install XP using the disc you were given from my experience with the sony XP disc. A clean XP install would probably be just a tad better than my current Vista setup.

Oh, and just for kicks, I still have the first screen shot I took right after I got to the desktop using the Sony XP Downgrade Disk:



Not pretty. But at least it's about half as many processes as the Sony factory Vista install.

 

I still don't know how ppl get "cold boots" in under a minute. I removed the bloatware, but still have a few Sony things running like stuff for the wifi or the Sony powermizer software. I consider "bloatware" things that are 30-day trialware and such, not so much those programs that try to make a difference.
But cold booting my system, I'll get to the password screen in about a minute. Then if I really wait for everything to finish loading, it's about 3:30mins later.

 

you really need to back up format and clean install in Im in Vista in about under a min