I have Vista Business installed on my desktop at home and love it so I decided I would install it on it’s own partition on my IBM T60p because I wanted to keep XP around just in case some of our school software didn’t work with it, I’d have the option to reboot into XP. I’m sure most of you might want that too so you’d also be going the dual boot route. The annoying problem I faced when I was done setting up Vista on its partition was when the boot menu comes up after POST, the two options are Microsoft Windows Vista and An Earlier Version of Windows. I found that annoying and then found out I couldn’t access boot.ini through msconfig or the System Properties so I did a little searching. What I found was there are two options: an easy one and a hard one. In case you’d like to do more research, the hard option is opening a command prompt (Start -> type in cmd and hit enter) and running BCDEDIT. It’s all command line and pretty confusing.

The easy way around this is downloading EasyBCD by NeoSmart Technologies. Once installed, you simply run it and click the Configure Boot button:

In the bottom half on the right, select An Earlier Version of Windows in the Choose an OS to change the associated settings drop down menu. You can then change the name in the Name text box. Hit the Save Settings button, reboot and your boot menu will now have the new name and Windows Vista!