hey. i've got a query i hope someone can shed some light on. i'm using xp home with my hewlett packard deskjet 720c printer. the xp driver for this is a generic one that basically cuts out all the extra features and basically just does enough to make the printer work. HP have stopped support for this printer and won't be issuing an updated driver. this isn't really a problem, but i am a 3rd year university student and i have to print out lots of data sheets, white papers, reports etc and these are up to 80 pages each. one of the features missing in the xp driver is double sided printing. as you can imagine, instead of having to carry around 40 pages i am lumped with 80! its also wasting a lot of paper. my query lies here--i want to install ME on a small hard drive to use simply for printing (as the ME driver includes the printing features). so i will be double booting ME and XP. firstly, will this cause any obvious problems? secondly, when i boot with ME can i still access all the programs installed under XP? and access my personal files? sorry if this seems a bit dumb but i've never used dual booting! cheers in advance

this isn't hard to do but you will have to install ME first then XP will automatically setup dual booting. Going the other way never really works. But I've done it several times as long as 2000 or xp is installed last you will have a dual boot machine automatically Can I sugest 98 rather than ME?

I would also recommend 98 over ME. If your XP partitions are not NTFS, you S/B able to see them from the other OS. G.

i've heard about that issue installing xp last but i cant do that as my pc is a warranty replacement from my old one that blew up (ie, i have xp on a partition of my hdd and not on cd). i dont want to go formatting etc as its a bit drastic for this little thing. i do have 98se and ME on cd. i know ME has a lot of bad press but compared to the issues i've had with 98 i would rather stick ME on! i take it i am just goin to have to stick with the crap xp driver--there is a workaround for it but its a bit complex! cheers

Skard, get a second harddrive, disconnect the first, install ME. Connect both, start the first, copy the data to be printed to the ME-hd, change in the BIOS the starting hd to the ME-hd. greetings from Germany, Dirk a second HD is anyway to be recommended for data-save.

Skard, Just put the second hard drive in the machine as a slave drive. Make sure the computer recognizes it properly. In XP, go to Start/Run/Ntbackup and create an Emergency Repair Disk. Boot the computer with a Win98/Me bootdisk and go into Fdisk. Create a partition on the second drive. Reboot and format the partition and start the Win98/Me install. After the install is complete do a repair install of XP which will setup dual boot.

FinePrint specializes in custom printer drivers that might help. I think they're about 40 dollars. Check it out. http://www.fineprint.com/products/fineprint/