OK after months of trying to make my self believe that vista wasnt so bad.. i finally caved, forked out the cash and bought xp.. I created a new partition.. which is only like 4.5 gb big(how do increase the size??) the set up went good, i installed all my drivers and Im ready to roll... almost... Now what im trying to do now is to get all my programs on my c drive (vista drive) to run on my i drive (xp) Some things work, such as cod 4, firefox and a few other games i have (which all run a heck of a lot faster on xp) but when i try to play or use the other apps/games it says that its not installed or its missing something, Now i learned if i reinstall the app while under my i drive to my c drive im able to use them but i dont really want to do all that. anything i can do here?

Hi I_hate_vista,

It's not really possible to run programs from one location on multiple operating system installs. This is because when applications are installed, they often spread out over other parts of the system - the registry, and other folders such as Application Data.

You should install applications on the new drive separately, although you can store them on the C:\ partition if you like. My recommendation would be to increase the size (you will need free unallocated space on the drive) of your XP partition and install the programs on the XP partition. Let us know if you need any help with this.

upgrader

Well I wouldnt say it isnt possible because as I stated, some games and apps do work.. but i think the problem does fall back to the reg and i dont wanna go threw and edit things! lol, but yah as far as making the partition bigger I tried to go threw disk managment but it isnt giving me the opt to expand my xp partition... are their any programs that are vista compatible that will allow me to do this?

Yeah, some programs will work but plenty won't. Maybe feasible is a better word

Did you try disk management on Vista? I don't think it is possible to Expand/Shrink on XP.

Yeah I tried that but it says im not able to shrink the drive anymore

Look at the graph at the bottom of disk management, do you have any unallocated space there. If not you will need to make some, I assume this is what you are trying to do?

You need to shrink a partition which has free space available, what is the exact error message you receive?

Also, its normal that you need to install an application in an OS to get it to work. If you really don't want to install, find out if there's a portable version of the apps you're using, or perhaps another application that does the same but is free and portable.

For a list of apps: check this site: The Portable Freeware Collection - Latest entries

Also, you can install a program to the directory it already is installed to. That way it won't cost you alot of space. This will work with a vista/xp dual boot install.