I'm considering using a dual boot Win 7 64 and Win XP 32. I've read many tutorials on how to do this, but I'm not finding a lot of info on the effects it will have on the games I already have installed.

I have XP now, installed to it's own partition, on a 300g HDD with two more partitions available on that drive. The majority of my games are installed on a separate 300g HDD.

Essentially, I want to know if I'll need to reinstall the games I have in order to play them with Win 7. Any info on other items (vid, sound drivers) that will need to be reinstalled would be much appreciated as well.

Thanks for any info.

If you're asking this question then you don't really have any understanding of what a dual boot is or does. Best way to describe it....it's like having two separate computers running on the same machine.

So if you're upgrading to windows 7, then you should just do a clean install. You can however save all of your saved game and game profile files so you don't lose any of that.

Back it all up, wipe it all, set it up as new

only issue is XP will take a chunk out of ur 300GB... should b ok but just bare it in mind

Way to answer his question there Beaknuke LOL

Thanks for the info. So far it's unanimous. Quit mucking around with XP.

LOL yep pretty much.

Reinstalling is pain in the butt but it's good to do. Best practice is it's something you should do at least once per year. Over the course of time, new drivers, app installs/uninstalls, things can just get a little bit screwy.

I want to post toooooooo.

There are some older games that aren't compatible with windows 7. You can usually still get them to work but you might have to screw with them a bit. Unless you have a specific use for XP, do as suggested, wipe your OS drive clean and do a fresh install of Win 7. You can go ahead and delete your games on your secondary drive as you will have to reinstall them.

If you do decide to dual boot both systems, start fresh, install win XP first since it's older. Then install win 7 and use a little boot utility to tweak your startup options. You will also have to install each game twice. Once in XP and once in Win 7 if you want access on both OS's. Same for drivers. Depending on how old or new your components are, you may have trouble finding the proper drivers for both OS's. A site such as tomshardware is a good place to seek help in that area. As posted, it's like having two computers which means twice the work. As for the partitions, I would just make two if you want both OS's on the same drive. It's not so much the size of windows, it's the size of newer software and games that will eat a drive up in no time.

I may be wrong, but I don't think there is an upgrade option going from XP to Win 7. I thought it was only from Vista to Win7. That would give you two options. Install it on your C:\ drive and it will delete your winXP. Install Win 7 on a second partition and you'll have both. But again, when you decide to commit the time to this task, back up your personal files, wipe the drive and start over as suggested. It's just easier and a fresh install always helps with performance.

Soooooooo, pretty much saying what the others have. Just wanted to make it look like we actually put some thought into the topic.

Also, since we don't know your system specs. make sure you can find those drivers before you do anything. Win 7 has a decent set of native drivers included but finding A win 7 driver for something back when all we had was XP can be a pain. I remember looking for old sound card drivers for quite sometime. Good luck!

no upgrade from XP to win 7 there is from 32bit Vista to 32bit win 7 but the upgrade is a bit shoddy best to do a full re install

Thanks so much for all the input everyone.

Just decided to use 7 by itself.