When Vista goes on sale next week (Jan 2007), some people may well try to set up multiple boot systems so that they can run Vista in parallel with previous versions of Windows. If you try this, you may find it helpful to be aware that the "restore points" created by Vista will be expunged whenever you run XP.
As Vista's boot process is quite different from that used by its predecessors, I'd strongly counsel anyone considering doing this to do some careful web searches before they try it out and certainly before committing production data to Vista in a multiply booted system.
Philip Ingram
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There are programs for creating a virtualization solution using software such as Parallels:
http://www.parallels.com/ and VMware: http://www.vmware.com
These products may allow the user to overcome the point mentioned above.
I recently set up XP Pro on a box, then using the Parallels software set up two Linux virtual computers using Ubuntu and SuSE.
PC users also have the ability to create completely networked, fully portable, entirely independent virtual machines on a single physical machine. The software is also available for setting up virtual computers within Intel-powered Max OS X.
Regards
Barry Thompson
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Microsoft also has a free product for this: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx
A colleague uses vmware to run two copies of Windows XP, one is German and the other Thai (for his wife). It just works.
Peter Lancashire, Düsseldorf
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