RE: La Machine Est Morte, Vive La Machine!

["Harry Binswanger" hb@xxxxxxxx]

Carl,

1. I don't know why you want to install Win7-Pro "over" what ships
with the machine. Is there really any practical difference for you
between Pro and Home?

2. Really minor: make your first partition be the OS you expect to
use most. That way, the default boot-up will be to it. For me,
that's 32 bit Win7; the 64bit Win7 that shipped with the Lenovo is
the second partition.

3. I didn't do anything special to make the partitions, so I guess
I'm using the Windows way of doing that, and I have no issues at
all with it. But maybe that's because I don't know of anything
better. Well, there's one really minor annoyance: in the white on
black screen that appears on bootup, both OS's have exactly the
same name; only the position on the list differentiates 32bit Win7
from 64bit Win7 on that screen.

4. I almost never boot into 64bit mode. I know I'm not using 6 G.
of my 8 G of RAM, but so what? It's nice to have it there for when
something goes wrong with the 32bit OS: I can see and read and
write to all the files on whichever partition is not booted from.
And I want to try NB 64 on the 64bit partition. Other than that, I
have yet to find any program (including InDesign and PhotoShop)
that doesn't run splendidly on the 32bit OS.

-----Original Message-----
From: xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx
[mailto:xywrite-bounce@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Distefano
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2014 9:30 PM
To: XyWrite Mailing List
Subject: La Machine Est Morte, Vive La Machine!

Advice needed -- bear with me while I expatiate.

My XP machine -- a Dell Dimension 8400 Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM
and a 160GB hard drive -- gave up the ghost last week, two months
short of its 10th birthday. It served me well, and XyWrite ran
beautifully on it. But now that Win XP is also moribund, I could
no longer avoid the long-dreaded decision about how to run XyWrite
under the new regime.
Since we recently moved from XP to 32-bit Win 7 Pro at work, this
seemed like the way to go to ensure compatibility between my home
and work setups (and to avoid, at least initially, the headache of
setting up a virtual 32-bit environment). The question is, how
best to implement it?

My new machine is on the way. It's an HP Envy 700xt (4th Gen Intel
Core
i7-4790 processor quad-core [3.6GHz, 8MB shared cache]) with 8GB
RAM and a 2TB SATA hard drive. It comes with Windows 7 Home
Premium 64 installed, but I've also bought licensed copies of Win
7 Pro, both 64- and 32-bit. I'm thinking of setting up a multiboot
system with, say, three partitions: Win 7-64 in one; Win 7-32 in
another; and, who knows, maybe one of the Linux distros in the
third. My basic question is, how best to do this?

I'm thinking along the following lines: First, install Win 7
Pro-64 over Home Premium in the existing partition. Then create
the two new partitions, and install Win 7 Pro-32 in the second.
(Let's leave what to do with the third partition until later.) My
first question is, should I use Windows to create the multiboot
system, or is there an external partitioning utility that's
preferable?

Second, I'm crestfallen over the prospect of not being able to run
Xy4 full-screen. I've become somewhat used to running it in a
window at work
-- I have no choice, as I lack the network privileges to do
otherwise.
But at home I'm wondering whether I should downgrade the video
drivers to enable DOS full-screen in my Win 7-32 partition. Anyone
here tried this? What are the pros and cons?

Once I get XyWrite running satisfactorily in the 32-bit partition,
I'll probably play around with virtual 32-bit environments in the
64-bit partition. When I do I'll no doubt have further questions,
even after I reread the volumes you all have written on the
subject in this space. It was all academic for me then, so a lot
went in one ear and out the other. But I'll be all ears now.

Liberté, égalité, full screen -- ou la mort!

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx