There are two ways to make space for Windows Vista on your existing PC. You can either add a second hard drive, using the new hard drive exclusively for Windows Vista, or you can partition your existing hard drive, creating two logical hard drives, or partitions, one for Windows XP and one for Windows Vista. The former method is the preferable one because it doesn’t require you to deal with messy partitioning software and potentially endanger whatever data you already have on the C: drive. On the other hand, you do have to go through the effort of installing the hard drive, which can be dicey if you don’t know your way around the innards of a PC. And of course, some desktop PCs and most notearticle PCs can’t be upgraded to support an additional hard drive. In such cases, you’ll need to partition the only hard drive you’ve got. If you’re going to install a second physical hard drive, there’s not much to say: Follow the manufacturer’s instructions, and you should be all set. Modern hard drives are quite capacious and will present no problems during setup. If you’re going to partition your existing hard drive, life isn’t so simple. Most partitioning tools, like the ones built into Windows, are what’s known as destructive partitioning tools - that is, they literally destroy whatever was on the disk while partitioning. What you’re looking for is a non-destructive partitioning tool, one that will let you slice an existing hard drive or partition into two or more partitions, while leaving all the data - and the operating system and applications - intact on the first. There are various commercial partitioning solutions out there. We use and recommend Norton PartitionMagic, which has always been reliable. But there are various free partitioning solutions out there as well. Just be careful: This is your data you’re messing with, and if the partitioning solution you use accidentally makes your hard drive inaccessible, don’t say we didn’t warn you. Also, you need to be sure to defragment your hard drive before partitioning in order to save time later (partitioning tools will defrag for you as needed, but aren’t as efficient or fast as dedicated partitioning tools). Finally, make sure you create a partition with enough space on it to install Windows Vista. Microsoft specifies that Windows Vista requires 15 GB of free space for the premium versions of the operating system (Home Premium and Ultimate). But remember you’re going to want to install applications and so forth. So the more space you can spare the better. To make it easier on yourself, preemptively name the new partition Vista or something similar, so you can more easily recognize it during Setup. You don’t want to accidentally wipe out your XP install.

Step-by-Step: Installing Windows Vista in a Dual-Boot Setup Assuming you have an additional free hard drive or partition, you can follow the steps outlined in the clean install section earlier in the article when performing a dual-boot installation: Boot with the Windows Vista DVD, choose Install, enter your product key, agree to the EULA, and so on. Where you’re going to have to pay attention is when Setup reaches the screen that asks, “Which type of installation do you want?” This is shown in article 2-24. Choose the Custom (advanced) install type and click Next. Then, examine the next screen, which should resemble article 2-25. In this screen, be sure to choose the empty partition that’s been set aside for Windows Vista and not your XP partition. If you followed our advice in the previous section, you gave this partition an easy-to-recognize name like Vista ahead of time. After that, Setup will proceed, again, exactly as it does during a clean install. After Windows Vista is installed, however, you will notice one difference: When you reboot the PC, a boot menu, like the one shown in article 2-26, appears, letting you choose between your previous operating system (Earlier Version of Windows) and Windows Vista. You might notice that the boot menu uses a fairly lengthy 30 second countdown during which time it waits for you to choose an operating system. That’s a long time to wait, and if you’re not sitting there waiting to make a choice, your system will waste a lot of time waiting to boot. Good news: If you think 30 seconds is too long, there’s a way to change this behavior. To do so, open the Start Menu, right-click Computer, and choose Properties. This will display the new System Information window, 2-27. Now, click the “Advanced system settings” link in the Tasks list on the left side of the System Information window.

This will display the System Properties dialog, which is quite similar to the System Properties dialog from Windows XP. Navigate to the Advanced tab and click the button labeled Settings that appears in the Startup and Recovery section. This, finally, will display the Startup and Recovery dialog box, shown in article 2-28, where, yes, you can configure startup options. Here, you can make a number of choices, but the relevant ones are: Determine which operating system is the default choice. Windows Vista is the default choice, by default. Determine how much time will elapse while the boot menu is displayed before the system boots into the default operating system. We like to set the timer to a small value like 3 or 5 seconds so that Windows Vista boots quickly but we have enough time to make a choice if we want to. We’ve been referring to Windows Vista’s dual-boot capabilities throughout this article, but the reality is that Windows Vista (and previous NT-based Windows versions like Windows 2000 and XP) support multi-booting. That’s right: With the right partitioning scheme, gobs of hard drive space, and plenty of time on your hands, you can configure your PC to boot between two, three, four, or more operating systems. Such a setup is conceptually interesting but of little use in the real world, at least for most people. As the saying goes, people who are dual-booting aren’t getting anything done.

Deploying Windows Vista: A Power User’s Toolkit If you’re an enterprise administrator faced with the prospect of rolling out Windows Vista to hundreds or thousands of desktops around the world, take heart: Microsoft has finally upgraded its deployment tools in dramatic fashion, taking advantage of the componentized architecture of Windows Vista. But these deployment tools aren’t just advantageous to the world’s biggest corporations. If you’re a power user, a tinkerer, or someone who ends up having to reinstall Windows fairly regularly, you might just be interested to discover that Vista’s newfangled deployment tools are going to prove quite enticing to you as well. Here’s what happened. With Windows Vista, Microsoft has completely rearchitected Windows for the first time since, well, Windows 95, breaking the system down to core pieces, called modules, which are as non-dependent on each other as possible. Before, each version of Windows included a foundational module that was based on the English language. If Microsoft, a PC maker, or an IT administrator wanted to create, say, a French version of Windows, they would have to add the French language on top of Windows. Now, Windows Vista is language independent.

The core foundational module of Windows is much smaller as a result, and it will now be easier for Microsoft - and IT administrators - to roll out patches because they won’t need different ones for all of the languages Windows supports. Microsoft also changed Windows Vista to a file-based disk imaging model. In the past, Windows Setup would spend a lot of time copying thousands of files from the Windows install media (typically a CD) or a network-based file share (when installed by corporations). These file operations were time consuming because each file had to be expanded and copied to a particular directory structure on the fly. With an image-based model, Windows Vista ships as a single image file containing just the most basic components required to get the OS up and running.

During installation, Windows Setup simply copies this single image file to the hard drive and then expands it, creating a simple Windows installation. After that, custom features are added and the OS is installed. Simple. Finally, Microsoft improved its Windows deployment answer file, a text-based file that literally contains the answers to the questions you answer during interactive Setup when you do a clean install, upgrade, or dual-boot. These questions include such things as “What is your product key?” But the beautiful thing is that the answer file can contain answers to questions that aren’t asked during Setup at all. In this way, we can create custom Windows install images that will install a version of Windows Vista that isn’t possible to obtain using just interactive Setup. But wait, there’s more: Even if all you want is a standard Windows install, creating your own answer file is still a good idea, because you can use that file to run what’s called an automated Windows install, where you don’t have to babysit the install process. It literally automates the whole thing. The key to all of this is something Microsoft calls Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). This free software kit includes a number of tools, including the User State Migration Tool (USMT), for migrating settings from Windows 2000 and XP to Vista; XImage, for editing Vista image files; Windows System Image Manager, for configuring custom Windows Vista images and creating unattended installaton files; and Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment), a simple Windows boot environment designed primarily to bootstrap Windows Vista installation and prepare a disk for the new operating system. As noted earlier, these tools are designed for enterprises, which typically need to roll out Windows Vista to large numbers of PCs in an automated fashion. But you can use these tools to create custom Vista install images, burn them to blank DVDs using the third-party disk burning software of your choice, and then install the version of Windows Vista you want. Unfortunately, the Windows Vista version of WAIK wasn’t completed in time for this article. But you can find complete instructions for creating custom Windows Vista install DVDs on the SuperSite for Windows (www.winsupersite.com).

Summary Although Windows Vista Setup is dramatically simpler than the Setup routine used by Windows XP, there are still many options to understand and features you’ll need to go back and configure manually after Setup is complete. Depending on which Vista version you purchased and your needs, you can clean install Vista as the sole OS on your PC, upgrade an existing Windows XP installation to Vista, or dual-boot between XP and Vista on the same machine. For the truly daring, you can also use Microsoft’s enterpriseoriented deployment tools to create your own custom-built Vista deployment image, ensuring that when you install the OS, you’re only installing exactly what you want.