I've wanted to play with the Vista and Office 2007 betas for a while now, but running it on a virtual PC image is kind of slow so I hadn't really done anything serious until last night.

Last night I rigged my laptop to dualboot both Vista and XP and so far so almost good.

The steps to get it running were pretty simple and borrowed from the lifehacker blog. Basically you do the following

1. Make an empty primary partition on your disk (use Partition Magic so you don't trash anything else on the disk). I made a 24 Gb partition.

2. Boot XP

3. Stick in the Vista disk and choose to install a new copy of Vista (don't upgrade).

4. Follow the bouncing ball through the initial steps (5 minutes) then go away and watch TV for a while.

5. Follow the next bouncing ball, enter a little bit of basic information and you're done.

All too easy :-)

The office 2007 beta install was also a piece of cake - took a little while to get done.

By the way, the only problem I've run into now is that the hibernate under XP crashes the machine - but then I think that might be a hardware problem since it used to fail to resume from hibernate fairly regularly.

Oh, one other thing - the Vista dualboot screen gives you the option of doing a memory diagnostic which is pretty cool since it eliminates RAM issues as the cause of driver problems.

The speed of Vista is great when running straight on the hardware and no virtualisation is involved. I'm really pleased with how it performs and now i've just got to get used to where everything lives now since Vista is remarkably different to XP.