Computer Tutorial

Dual booting:-


                             You're brand new Windows Vista or Windows 7 equipped PC can almost certainly run Windows XP quite nicely too, (assuming you can find Windows XP drivers for all your hardware). Setting up more than one operating system on a single computer is usually called "dual booting". Some adventurous users even triple or quad boot between versions of Windows and various flavours of Linux! When you want to change the operating system, simply power down and reset your computer then select your alternative operating system from a special boot menu. Alternatively, you can use a removable hard drive caddy and simply swap one operating system drive for another one.
This approach is quite appealing in some scenarios. If you set up Windows XP on your PC, then naturally you'll get 100% compatibility with Windows XP software. This is great news for game players who've amassed large collections of video games over the years that Windows XP has been available. Unlike the emulation and virtualization options that we discuss later in this article, your Windows XP installation will run as quickly and smoothly as possible, with full access to your computers hardware.
There are several rather large drawbacks to this approach too. Firstly and most importantly, configuring your computer to dual boot is a complex process, one that varies from machine to machine and one that can certainly end in disaster if not done correctly. A full discussion of how to set up a dual boot system is beyond the scope of this article. Secondly, it's worth reiterating that in order to switch from one operating system to another, you must shut down the current operating system then reboot the alternative. While this probably won't matter to gamers, the inconvenience of having to save all your work, shut down all your applications and switch operating systems like this in order to run a desktop or productivity application may be too much for most users.
The next part of the article discusses two important technologies for running older sofware on modern hardware, namely emulation and virtualization. Click the link below to move to the next part of the article.