Windows Vista & XP

Dual Boot Vista and XP Guide.

Hi All!
In this tutorial, I will be showing you how to dual-boot Winows Vista and XP, knowing that you already have Vista installed on your hard drive. And No, this isnt just a copied tutorial from some other site. I made it because I did dual booting and I’ve taken care of the problems in this tutorial that you might run into when you try to dual-boot.

You might ask, is it hard? No, it’s not hard, it’s just a little time consuming.
Ok, let’s get to it. +
Drivers:
Go to Start and in Search, type Device Manager. Look for all the drivers that you are going to need for your computer on XP. For example: Sound, Graphics, Ethernet, Wireless.
How to look for drivers in device manager? Your sound drive should be listed under Sound, Video and Game Controllers. Your graphics driver should be listed under Display adapters. Your Ethernet and wireless drivers should be listed under Network Adapters.
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How to make Vista work like XP

How to make Vista work like XP

A lot of people are crying about how they don’t like how Vista works compared to XP. Heres how to make Vista work as smoothly as XP:

1. Type secpol.msc in the search box and on the secpol that appears at the top of the start menu, right click on that and select run as administrator.

2. Click on Security Settings

3. Select Local Policies

4. Select Security Options

5. Double-click User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode

6. Choose Elevate without prompting

7. Click ok

This setting becomes immediately active.

No more prompts for permission for everything you do.

This leaves Vista User Account Control enabled but tinkers just a bit with some of the settings of UAC instead of completely disabling the UAC function which disables the complete security feature in Windows Vista, which is not a wise thing to do.

Thats it.

Increase network performance when playing media

Windows Vista throttles your network bandwidth when you are playing any multimedia file such as an MP3 or a video. This was designed to ensure the CPU has enough free cycles available to play your media without skipping.  The down side is that when you are playing a multimedia file you will notice that your network speed of file transfers will decrease on high speed network connections. By default when you are playing a multimedia file your network transfers are limited to 10 packets per millisecond.

In Windows Vista SP1 Microsoft introduces a registry key that allows you to customize this setting.

	[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile]
	NetworkThrottlingIndexValue

You can set NetworkThrottlingIndexValue between 1 and 70.  If you want to disable set the hexadecimal value to FFFFFFFF.

Microsoft warns that if you increase the value above 10 you may experience playback quality issues. Depending on your network setup, it is worth experimenting.

After making any changes a restart is needed.

Guide taken from :

http://tweakvista.com/article39258.aspx