[Geminiwave]

okay so I dont have another hard drive to play with and I REALLY dont want to be making crazy partitions on my current hard drive...soooooooo I heard there was a way of doing a virtual desktop or something(cant remember) where you can install beta OSes or linux or whatever in a contained enviornment and it wont ruin your primary OS or anything. I'd kinda like to try that out if anyone knows what I use to do it. I keep wanting to say its Virtual PC but I dont think thats it.

[Tipstaff]

There was Connectix Virtual PC, which allowed you to run multiple instances of operating systems at the same time. Microsoft bought them out last year, and released Microsoft Virtual PC 2004.

VMWare was another one. With VM you get to evaluate it for 30days, and it allows you to drag-and-drop files between operating systems if you installed VMTools, which, btw, Virtual PC doesn't.

[The_Neon_Cowboy]

Just create a secondary partition on the drive, install the OS to it.... it's that simple

[Geminiwave]

creating a secondary partition is a huge bother and I'd have to free up space anyway. This hard drive is pretty full.

Besides its all very temporary. I'd like to remove it when I'm done and have that hard drive space back(and not in a seperate partition)

[md5]

I wouldn't recommend you to put Vista on a PC together with XP. Most likely, MS will have updated the OS bootfiles (NTDETECT.COM and ntldr), which means that your XP installation MIGHT have problems. If you just want to see the OS, just get VMWare and play with Vista safely in a Virtual Machine

[Geminiwave]

so I can do that? I can install it within VMware and it wont screw up my computer? Thats all I really want to know.

[md5]

Yes, if you install something in VMWare it won't screw UP your PC. VMWare is a "PC withing a PC"