Questions about Vista, dual booting and Dual Core 2

[hudson]

1) Say I gots a laptop with the following specs...

Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2GHz
2 GB RAM

...how would it compare in terms of general performance against my current hoover like noisey P4 3.2GHz, 2 GB RAM laptop?

2) Never touched Vista before and I don't hear much nice things about it, but new machines are coming with this pre-installed. I've seen you can set up XP/Vista dual booting, does anyone recommend this or can it be a bit unstable?

3) With dual booting setup... does the laptop have 2 different sets of drivers, one lot on one partition for one OS and another set on the other?

One last question... 4) A laptop I've spied comes with Vista Business, is this a good or bad thing for someone who is not running a business?

[Salsa Party Animal]

I got Windows Vista 64 bits and it work very well and reliable but it doesn't have necessary driver support on hardware.

I mean in our house 3 printer doesn't work with it, a scanner, and digital camera but I can use card reader and ipod shuffle and joypad.

If you haven't got much hardware go for it.

[hudson]

I mean drivers for the components in the laptop itself. Say the graphics card... do you just install the Vista graphics driver to Vista and the XP one as well.. or?

[Number45]

Dual booting basically means you have two completely independent operating systems running on the machine. Just think of it as having two completely different computers, so you'll need drivers for both.

[hudson]

Thanks.

Now if anyone can answer my other questions, that would be grand.

[Number45]

I personally would try and avoid Business. Get Home Premium if you can, it has the MCE functionality which I'm pretty sure Business lacks.

As I mentioned above, dual booting is two separate OSeseses, so stability is only an issue within each instance itself.

Not sure on the performance. My gut feeling is that the performance would be comparable until you use an application that has multi-core support, at which point you should see the Core Duo pull away.