Jon <3 Vista?

A few weeks ago I cleared my increasingly problematic XP installation from my hard drive, and I re-installed the OS of my laptop's birth: Windows Vista. Perhaps I'm the only person who has ever gone from Vista to XP, and then back to Vista. However, despite what you may think, the sense of individuality wasn't my primary motive. I'll be honest: I am a sucker for shiny graphics, which Vista has in abundance. Besides, on top of the aforementioned gradual implosion of my previous installation, I was convinced that XP SP3 wasn't using all my 3GB of RAM. Since I haven't found anything better to use my RAM for, I may as well use it for shiny graphics.

Another problem I was having on XP was with Adobe Photoshop CS4, which enjoyed crashing randomly and with no apparent cause. Afterwards, when I loaded the program again, it would helpfully tell me that "there was a crash" (paraphrase), and proceed to tell me how I probably couldn't do anything about it even if I tried really hard. For some reason, I thought that moving to Vista would solve my problem. The weird thing is that it did, which says something for Microsoft's otherwise much reviled OS.

Although Vista wasn't all it was cracked up to be, we shouldn't forget the good things that it brought us. Firstly, and perhaps controversially, I will mention User Account Control. Yes, the incessant pop-ups asking you whether "you're sure that you want to click on that file?" can get a bit annoying, but the flip side is that it's now your fault if you get a virus, since nothing gets on the machine except for what you allow. Another great feature is the logging of events and resource usage, which allows you to see exactly what your PC has been getting up to.

So I was quite happy for a while, until I remembered about all the programs I own that are no longer supported by Vista. I partioned my second hard drive and installed XP, and used EasyBCD to create a dual-boot system. Then I thought, "hey, what's a dual-boot system if I don't have Linux?" - I know you were all thinking that too. So, fully aware that one false move would erase my entire virtual livelihood, I installed Linux Ubuntu 8 on another partition on hard drive number 2.

In memorandum

I do have a soft spot for Microsoft operating systems. Maybe it's because I was brought up on them, including MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, ME (less said about that one, the better) and XP and Vista. Unfortunately, I'm coming to terms with the fact that even though Windows-powered machines can do almost anything you want they don't necessarily do it very well. I think people are realising, and the demographic for OS use is changing. Linux have had the programmer's preference for a long time, while Apple has been consistently breaking its own records for market share over the past five years. However, I'm still childishly excited about Windows 7, as Microsoft have taken a wrecking ball to almost everything they've sellotaped together over the past 20 years, and have started again. And it looks FAST. Incidentally, the RC release is out later today, as of the time of writing this.

Anyway, I've just read about a way to set up a virtual Mac installation on my PC, using PearPC, so I'm off to quadruple-boot. I'd better leave some space for Windows 7 RC, which will put me in the fairly modest quintuple-boot situation. Has anyone else ever done this? Meanwhile, here are some resources from apcmag that you can use to help set up a mutliple boot system:

• "How to dual boot Vista and XP (with Vista installed first)"
• "How to dual boot Windows XP and Linux (with XP installed first)"