different bootups without dual booting? (WXP-Home) [Archive]

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pjo

02-14-2006, 09:31 AM

Trying to do the impossible.

My daughter has every bit of software known to mankind running which insist on various services being there.

My son just wants to play Everquest2 and Battle for middle earth.

Problems are twofold.

First my son needs a way of booting with minimal services running and minimal programs auto starting (but at the same time, my daughter needs to be able to boot with everything there)

2nd, Battle for middle earth only works properly on this PC with old Nvidia drivers 77.77, yet Everquest runs better with the newest drivers.

It's a fairly old PC, we only have 22GB disk space left. What does the panel suggest please?

Athlon XP 1800+
1GB Ram
Gforce 6200 256MB

Thanks

Phil

monkey_1

02-14-2006, 09:47 AM

Install a second instance of XP in a new different partition (I think 10GB is enough) and you could boot to either...

_______
Mono

BertImmenschuh

02-14-2006, 05:38 PM

The only way to avoid dual-booting in a scenario as you ask about is to use a Mobile Rack. It contains an IDE HDD and is exchanged before booting up. Each cartridge with its own HDD can have whatever installed on it.

Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

motoflop

02-16-2006, 09:46 AM

Windows supports hardware profiles. This is normally used with laptops. When your laptos is docked, you have different devices that when undocked. Luckily this feature is not limited for laptops.

See control panel -> system -> hardware -> hardware profiles. Create copy of current profile. After that you can go to services panel. When you have more that one profile, you can configure per service all profiles in which that service is enabled.

Profiles are visible when you boot your pc. Windows will ask which profile you want use. That way you can have different bootable configurations. I'm not sure if you can install different display drivers, but you could try.

Then finally warning: I haven't ever tried this myself. I have just read that this should be possible, but who knows ...

If you try this, let us know if it works or not.

cyclic

02-20-2006, 04:30 AM

Profiling is the best way to do what you want, making a new install with the same OS disk is technically illegal but not to worry since the use of profiles is there for exactly the reasons you state, create a profile for the other user you want to limit access to hardware or software, you can disallow if software can be installed or removed and just about everything else. The Help system explains in plenty of detail how to do this, when completed each user will boot to a 'custom' OS which is the one XP already installed.

pjo

02-20-2006, 03:20 PM

Many many thanks all.

Was just about to install 2nd copy of XP when I re-checked this site :)

Saved me a big headache. Will set up profiles.

best

Phil

Well it was very easy to do but have run into 1 big problem. Can say which services etc I want started and which devices disabled, but I cant see a way of having my Nvidia card enabled in both profiles yet using a different driver for each :-(Edited by pjo on 02/20/06 15:37.