I switched to Vista last spring, with hardly a look back. It's on both my computers, the Lenovo T61 and MacBook Pro. For those times I do need XP, it's still running on the AMD tower in my office. This fall, however, I'm doing workflow training for the Associated Press internationally, and need to do that running Windows XP. And the last thing I wanted to do was wipe a laptop and re-load XP.

My first plan was to take advantage of the second drive I've got installed in the Lenovo. The T61 has a neat option where you can take out the DVD drive and replace it with a bay containing a second hard drive. I've loved having a 100GB 7200 RPM internal drive with a 120GB second drive in the bay. I hoped that I could just do a bootable installation of XP on that second drive and be all set. Problem was, despite a number of tries, a lot of time on the internet and talking with smarter friends, I couldn't find a way to make that work.

I'd almost decided to just replace the boot drive in the Lenovo with a new one and install XP on that. Then I came across an article at Lifehacker.com by Gina Trapani on using Virtual PC 2007. The link is http://lifehacker.com/software/windows/geek-to-live--run-windows-xp-inside-vista-with-virtual-pc-238071.php. Turns out Microsoft makes a free application called Virtual PC, and it's been recently updated to work with Vista. Virtual PC lets you run other versions of PC-based OS's from within Vista. It runs on several versions of Windows, including XP Pro and Server 2003, and on Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate.

Downloading Virtual PC 2007 and following Trapani's instructions, I had a working XP installation running from within Vista. Cool! Loaded up Photoshop CS2 and Photo Mechanic 4.4.3.3 (the apps I'd be teaching on) and everything worked. Last step was to see if I could run PowerPoint in Office 2007 on the Vista side, then switch seamlessly to live demos on the XP installation. Passed with flying colors.

Once again I'm thankful for all the people who take the time to post solutions on the internet. When teaching digital photography, I often joke that people pay me to read the manuals. And when it comes to solving computer problems, ninety-percent of the time the internet is what saves me.