Hi guys,

Here's a thought.
I've been considering dabbling with Vista, but would also like to keep my XP config running since I have quite a bit of s/w installed that is very stable in its current environment.

So, rather than installing both operating systems and all the fuss that would involve, is it possible just to add another hard drive and then somehow choose which one to boot from at start up. Or maybe have the XP harddrive as the default and then a hot-key to override and boot from the Vista harddrive on the odd occasion.

Thankyou.

Some motherboards let you access a boot menu without having to go into the bios. For example, pressing the F11 will give you a list of boot devices. That might work. Otherwise, you would have to change the boot order in the bios manually, every time you wanted to swap operating systems.

Isn't what you're describing just dual booting XP & Vista? To do that the two OSes need to be on separate partitions so you'd have XP on one drive and Vista on the other. The Vista boot manager then lets you pick which one you want to boot.