You should not have any problems dual booting the machine. Go tothe link below and download your needed drivers, I would suggest slipstreaming them with nLite and having a pretty functional O.S. Install immediately after installation (You most likely will HAVE to integrate your chipset/sata drivers to install XP).

You will need to partition your hard drive for the XP install and you can use a free partitioning tool like Gparted Live,Paragon Partition Manager or Vista's GUI Partition editor (boot to Vista OS Disc) - but make sure you backup your files and data first! Because working with partitions can cause data loss. You can use Paragon Hard Drive Manager or Acronis True Image for imaging the drive - both of which have free versions you can use, or you can try DriveImage XML.

After you partition the drive you need to boot up the XP install disc and do a normal install, be careful not to install on your Vista partition. After installation is complete you will only be able to boot to XP and will have to modify the bootloader. You can boot to the Vista OS disc and do a start up repair and then use EasyBCD to configure the bootloader to allow you to select which OS you want to boot to. Optionally and probably the easiest way is to just install EasyBCD after booting up to XP and restoring the Vista bootloader and configuring the dual boot options from there. You can go to the supplied links to find all the necessary information as this is more or less an overview and to show you where to find everything you need to know.

 

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?os=WW1&osl=EN&catid=-1&impid=-1&servicetag=&SystemID=XPS_1730&hidos=WLH&hidlang=en&TabIndex=

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

http://www.partition-manager.com/

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

http://www.nliteos.com/

http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/

http://apcmag.com/how_to_dual_boot_vista_and_xp_with_vista_installed_first__the_stepbystep_guide.htm

mtx8000spl,

Thanks for the information, unfortunately I am not an experienced computer user so am not sure what you mean by slipsteaming with nLite and integrate chipset/sata drivers.

Would it be possible for you to give some further details please as I have a fairly new machine and don't want to ruin it by not being clear about the procedure involved.

About the most ambitious I have done previously was installing XP in a Virtual Machine as I hoped this would avoid dual booting, but the package I intended to use suffered licensing issues in a virtual machine.

Would be grateful if you could assist further please.

Thank You