Windows 7 Pro/ Win XP Mode

All, Thanks for a great forum; my situation is;
-Running WINXP pro on Dell D820 Latitude, 4 gig ram, 32 bit OS. I have a WD 160 gig external usb hard drive.
-Ordered a 30 gig Intel SSD hard drive to improve performance. I have found some posts with XP issues using SSD's efficiently, so will probably upgrade to Win7 Pro. I am in a corporate enviroment so pro is needed.
Question-1) Should I upgrade to 7 because of the SSD upgrade?
Question-2) Since I will need the XP compatibility mode to run older programs, should I consider using XP mode in win-7 or have a dual boot setup?
Question-3) will using XP Mode in win 7 on my new ssd be too large for the 30 gig drive? Can the xp mode reside on my external HD?

Thanks,
DX9100

 

You will be cutting it pretty damn close with 30 GBs. Windows 7 takes approximately 12 GBs to install and Windows XP mode takes an additional 15 GBs according to Wikipedia and the Microsoft website...

You may want to return the SSD if you can and get an 80 GB one at the least...

Otherwise if you really aren't going to be using this computer with a lot of programs, install Windows 7 with a 20 GB Partition, and have around 8 GBs left, then make an 8 GB partition for Windows XP and have about 4 GBs left there with dualbooting, but just know that this isn't the same as Windows XP Mode, it's not emulation or anything. (A 30 GB SSD is approximately 28 GBs due to formatting differences.)

Hope that helps.

 

You should just install windows 7 on yoru SSD and just install xp mode on your external hdd.

 

What older programs are you running? I can and do run all kinds of older programs on my Win7, 32bit version. If you get the 64 bit version then you will need XP mode in order to run 16 bit programs.