How-To Geek

I have recently purchased an Acer 7250G, and received it with Vista Home Premium pre-installed onto it. I tried following your Dual boot article after purchasing an XP professional SP2 cd. However when it came to the step where I insert the XP cd and boot it (at this point during the boot, I have accepted the licence agreement and all that jazz); it says: Cannot read the CD you have inserted. Or the CD is not a Genuine Windows CD. Insert one for the following Windows-product-Cds in your CD-Rom Drive: Windows XP Home, Windows 95, or Windows NT Workstation 3.51.1 (Full-Version), Windows 2000

Press Enter when the CD is in the drive
Press F3 to abort the installation.

What am I doing wrong? I have tested the CD in my older laptop and it works fine and takes me to the step where it prompts me to pick a drive to install the OS on.
The CD-ROM Drive is functioning as its meant to. I popped in a DVD and played it in Vista, as well as throwing in an iTunes CD and installed iTunes without hassle on the Vista OS.

I am getting so incredibly frustrated with this whole Vista hassle it's almost depressing. The main reason I want to have XP on my computer as well is because I am a graphic design student, and I've heard that PhotoshopCS2 and IllustratorCS2 are only compatible with XP.

And maybe while you guys are being totally awesome and solving my problem you might be awesome'er and tell me about this myth. I have 2GB DDR RAM on my new laptop. I've heard from people that the minimum requirement to run Vista is 1GB RAM. Does this mean that I am only left with 1GB Ram to use on other things such as games etc?

Eek,

I'm currently running Photoshop CS2 under Vista... it's how I've done most of the artwork on this site. I haven't installed Illustrator, but anybody that says Photoshop won't work is just flat out wrong.

If you have problems installing, you may want to launch the setup in Administrator mode by right-clicking on the setup program and choosing Run as Administrator.

It's true that Vista requires 1GB of RAM, but I've actually gotten it to work with less... it's just slow. I think that the requirement was Microsoft's way of forcing people to upgrade to decent machines to use Vista, so that it will seem very fast.

2GB of RAM should be plenty to do virtually anything you want to do. I have quite literally 20-30 apps open at any given point while running Vista on a 2GB machine, and I have no problems whatsoever. The system will report weird numbers of the amount of memory free, because of SuperFetch, but ignore it and just see if your apps run fine.

Games are still a little shaky on Vista... I've heard a lot of complaints that their favorite game doesn't run on Vista, etc. I'm not an expert on this, because I don't really play games. Too busy working at my multiple jobs =)

Back to the first point... I'm guessing there's a problem with the compatibility of your CD drive with XP. There might be an option in the bios to put the cdrom drive into some sort of compatibility mode, which would allow booting.

For speeding up vista, you should probably get rid of most of the crapware that acer installed... I'm betting that is most of the problem, since Vista is very fast for me.

Here's what you might try: the PC Decrapifier

http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/home

And yes, the How-To Geek is supposed to be one of the friendliest help sites around. That's part of our goal, both with the articles and also the forum. Thanks for the compliment =)

You should copy any data that you'd like to keep off that partition back onto your regular drive. I suspect there's nothing on there, since you didn't get far in the install.

Once you delete the partition (which is the correct thing to do) then you can extend your C: partition to fill the space back up.