Vista 64-bit and Windows 7 Beta 64-bit dual boot on XPS 730

I have successfully clean installed Vista 64-bit, thanks to Chris M, and Windows 7 Beta 64-bit, thanks to Microsoft, in a dual boot setup on my XPS 730. I must say this went much smoother than anticipated and surprised me at how well it works. I only had one discrepency (yellow exclemation) in device manager after installing Vista and it was for a Bluetooth device. Windows 7 Beta installed without a single issue, nothing, nada, zilch. On both OS`s I installed the latest Vista 64 video driver (182.06) for the GTX 285 video card and then installed the nVidia System Tools with ESA support version 6.03. I also installed Works 9 and Roxio Creator DE 10.2 on both and since things were going well I decided to install a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800 media center tv tuner.

I did manage to botch the install of a older HP printer on Win 7 by connecting the USB cable befor powering on the printer but I think I have that straightened out now, at least I`m no longer getting an error message at startup saying the drivers did not install correctly.

The only game I have tried so far is Microsoft Golf Links 2003 and I only installed it in Win 7. I played one round online against my brother who lives about 100 miles from me and the game played fine.

I have messed around with windows media player some in both OS`s and so far I have not encountered any problems. The libraries have populated with my music even though I keep my music on a seperate harddrive. I`m using the onboard sound  setup for 5.1 speakers and it sounds great, no cracking and poping like others have had (knocks on wood).

This post is getting long winded so I will end it here. I just wanted to share my experience with the dell community. If anyone has any questions feel free to ask and if I know the answer I`ll gladly share.

Pat