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#1
Dual boot Win10 with Win7 or Win 8.1 you already have on your PC
I am a computer technician and I work out of my home.
I probably have a half-dozen computers. A few are running Windows 7 Home Premium, one has been set up to dual boot to Windows 7 Pro or Windows XP Pro and one has Windows 7 Pro and Windows 8.1 Pro (another dual boot system).
I recently took my Dell OptiPlex 380 PC that was running Windows 7 Pro, with a 500 GB hard drive and UPDATED it to Windows 10. The update took less than an hour and everything is running fine.
By updating to Windows 10 Pro means I can no longer use Windows 7 Pro, right? Wrong!
After UPDATING to Windows 10 Pro, I simply reduced the size of my 500 GB hard drive by 200 GB and made a new partition which I named WIN7PRO. Then I booted to my Windows 7 Pro DVD and installed the OS onto the 200 GB partition. Since I had been running Windows 7 Pro on this system, and have a Product Key sticker on the top of the case, I was able to activate Windows by simply entering the Product Key.
When I rebooted the PC, I was given the option of using Windows 10 Pro or Windows 7 Pro (with Windows 10 Pro as the default OS, which means if I did nothing it would boot into Windows 10 Pro).
Everything works just fine with both Operating Systems.
Here's by beef with Microsoft on this issue:
Why should we have to UPGRADE to Windows 10 and lose our already installed Windows 7, which is supported by Microsoft until January 14, 2020?
Windows 10 is supported until October 14, 2025, the End of Extended Support Date.
The Dell OptiPlex 380 PC is NOT my main computer, I have another one running Windows 7 Pro that I have been using for well over a year. Doing the Windows 10 UPDATE and reinstalling Windows 7 Pro was a no-brainer for me.
But what if I did this with my main computer? There is a good chance that some of the programs running fine on Windows 7 Pro may not function properly with Windows 10.
Microsoft could show it cares about their customers by allowing anyone who wants to run a dual-boot system with their Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 PC by allowing them to simply install Windows 10 on a different partition on their hard drive or better yet on another hard drive installed in their system. It would save their customers a great deal of angst plus give them a safe way to compare the two operating systems without losing any of their data.