I’m going to preface this tip by saying the entire process is more involved than the scope of a daily tip, so I am only going to give very high level steps.

If you are hesitant to upgrade to Windows Vista because one of your programs is not supported, you can install and run Windows XP completely inside of Windows Vista. The magic is all in a fantastic free product, Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. This is not a dual boot, but a complete OS installation inside of Vista, itself. I use this setup every day at work in order to run Vista as my primary OS and can seamlessly open my XP installation at any time to run apps which do not work in Vista.

Here is a high level overview of what you would need to do in order to do this. It really isn’t hard… seriously.

1. Download and install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007.
2. Create a new virtual machine. You can either use the XP preset or customize it yourself.
3. Put your XP install disk inside your CD drive.
4. Start the XP virtual machine and as it boots up, the XP installation program will load.
5. Install XP as you would on any PC.
6. That’s it.

Once the installation is done, you will have a complete XP environment inside your Vista installation.

Note: I would recommend you have ~2 GB of memory before doing this. The reason is while you are running a virtual PC, both it and Vista will be using memory (because you are running 2 OS’s at once).