partition sizing for xp/vista

I will have a HP 8510p with windows xp and a new 320GB hard drive shipping to my house as soon as I get back home. I am going to have to dual boot to be able to use some of my work programs from xp, but want DX10 for games on vista. If you were me would you go 2 or 3 partitions. I was thinking 3 so I could store my info i need from both sides there, to make things less confusing. Also what size would you use for the 2 or 3 partitions.

 

I recommend that you look into using VMWare on your system. You can keep everything on one partition, then install XP inside a VMware session. This allows you to avoid the pain of rebooting back and forth, and also avoids all of the partitioning nonsense. You can have both XP and Vista running at the same time, and you can share files over the local network.

VMware Server is free to download and use. VMware workstation is not free but adds some cool features (though not really necessary). Other virtualization options are the free "Virtual Box", and even Microsoft has Virtual PC (which I think is also free). My preference is for VMware, but your needs may differ.

VMware and the like are good for almost everything except for playing games and doing very intensive processing like high-traffic databases.

 

I had not even thought about that option. Thanks for the info. I will do some more research. Never tried this before, Is there any problems will using serial ports, or pcmia slots in a VM?

 

Serial ports no, for pcmcia, it depends on what you mean. If you have a pcmcia card that is used for networking, then that's just another network adapter and it will be fine. However if they system needs direct access to the PCMCIA port for some reason, that may be a problem. What type of PCMCIA device are you using?

 

I am using the NDPA-02 card listed below. I use it to talk to the ABB invertor motors drives I work on.

DriveWindow
DriveWindow, version 2.2 onwards for DCS800, is the start-up and maintenance PC program for DCS600, which can be run on laptop PC under Windows 2000TM or Windows XPTM. CD ROM drive (for installation) and PCMCIA slot are necessary. The Drive Window package contains the installation CD ROM, NDPA-02 PC card, NDPC-12 connector between PC card and optical fiber cable and 10m plastic optical fiber cable. DCS800 requires the SDCS-COM-8x option. A monitoring network connection is also possible. The tool has the following features:
-
Parameter programming
Feedback display and analysis
Local operation
Parameter uploading, saving as file and downloading, comparing with saved files
Fault detection for trouble-shooting
Monitoring and data logger
Fault logger
OPC interface
Find more in DriveWindow 2 User Manual


It is a network card of sum type. I do not know what type it is will have to look into that to.

thanks again for the help

 

Hmm, you might have a problem there. Usually it's that type of engineering equipment that has custom interfaces into the system. It could use some sort of generic network interface to the system that would show up in the network control panels, or it could interface as a generic serial port, both of which should work OK.

If it's not a generic interface like that, you may be out of luck. They would need to have Vista drivers, which seems to be the root of the problem.