Considering Dual Boot with XP SP3 - worth it?

[mitchellvii]

Hi,

Right now I am running an AMD 6000+ processor on Vista 64 with 4 GB 6400 Ram and EVGA 8800 GT GPU. Runs real nice and games (including Crysis) run smooth. My rig is set up with 2 hard drives. Drive #1 has my Vista 64 OS and Applications. Drive #2 has all my games installed.

Questions:
1. Now that XP SP3 is out, should I set up a dual boot for gaming?
2. Since my games are all on Drive #2, should I install XP Professional there or on Drive #1 where my Vista is?
3. Will the applications/games I installed under Vista work under XP or would I need to re-install them?

The latest benchmarks I have seen for gaming Vista vs XP shows almost no benefit to XP anymore with the latest drivers. Will SP3 imporve XP enough to make it worth it?

Thanks!

 

[Zoron]

No. If your setup is working for you the way it is, I wouldn't mess with it. There's no point in installing XP if Vista is doing everything you want.

 

[mitchellvii]

Thanks Zoron,

Yeah, that makes sense. It's a lot of trouble just to get an extra 3 FPS in most games where I am already getting 80 FPS.

I would like to be able to crank up the anti-aliasing a bit on Crysis though. Right now I am running at 4x very smooth. I have no idea what my FPS are - all I know is that the game runs smooth and I guess that's all that counts.

I think part of my problem here is that now I've got my rig running just perfect, I'm kinda bored and I want to tinker with it, lol

 

[cyber5]

I know this thread is old, and most of you may not care about Win2K anymore, but in case you are wondering if you can do a multi-boot with Win2k and XP Pro SP3 - I have found a solution ..... Kind of...

Seems SP3 introduces an NTLDR that has a problem with system hive files over a certain size. M$ says about 10megs, I have one about 7, and it is a problem.

I had 2k running fine, added XP on separate drive as parallel install. Booted XP fine - did not allow 2k to boot anymore. Fixed that by reinstalling original Win2000 NTLDR to C: so that Win2K would boot. Of course, that kills XP.

My solution is to load both NTLDRs onto C:

If I am in 2K and want to reboot to XP - I rename NTLDR to NTLDR.2000 and NTLDR.xp to NTLDR. Reverse that if you need to go the other way.

This is a kludgy workaround, and because of that factor, I am not going to step-by-step it for you. If you don't get the idea, you should not be renaming system hive files at all. It obviously causes some problems with stuff like making accurate system.alt files, but for now it's a way to dual boot. If somebody has a better way to dual boot XP SP3 and 2k SP4, let me know...I'd prefer to avoid using 3rd party boot apps also. Anyone figured out a way to do it cleanly???