Is there a way to have multiple operating systems on a pc. As in be able to switch from vista to xp? I saw a post in a different forum where someone said "I am useing a dual boot vista 32 and xp pro 32." I don't know what that means but if it means there is a way to run vista and xp on one machine somehow and anyone on here knows I'd like to know how.

You can either dual-boot (by using 2 separate partitions on your hard drive)
or you can run one of the OS's in a virtual machine on the other OS

When dual booting you've got to shut the system down in order to boot into the other operating system
When using a virtual machine, both operating systems can run simulateously.

In my case, I use the virtual machine because I'm not real concerned with the performance of the OS in the virtual machine.
For things like games, dual booting would be more responsive.

So, in short, it depends on what you want to do with the 2 OS's

1.I want to dual boot. how do i do it? could i use an external hard drive for the space for one of the OS's?


2.When you use a virtual machine does the performance of the normal OS get worse too or just the virtual machine OS?

If you have XP installed and an empty partition you just have to intall Vista onto the empty partition and Vista setup will make it a dual-boot setup.
Microsoft does not support booting from an external drive. I've seen some hacks that make it work for XP, but they are complicated and work only if your motherboard supports booting from USB.
Only when the virtual OS is running, then they are sharing the same hardware resources and the host OS will suffer a performance penalty.

I think I'm going to try a virtual machine first. If i don't like it then I'll come back and ask how to dual boot. I have vista 64bit and nothing is compatible with it right now so i want to run XP.

never mind this post