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Win 7 and Win 8 on same machine?
Cholas
Posts: 123
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I get a lot of pleasure from the wise advice offered on this forum although sometimes things are spoilt from the reader's perspective by some pretty hectic arguments along the lines of one man's meat being another's poison. Such seems to be the case with WIN 8 so I thought I would try it to form an opinion of it for myself. My 8GB Win 7 64 bit machine is about to receive a nice new 256GB SSD and because I bought it only a few weeks ago that very nice and benevolent company Microsoft have sent me a disk of Win 8 Pro for a pittance (well in Microsoft terms it's probably a pittance). I believe other folk on here run both on the same machine so any words of advice, pitfalls to watch out for will be gratefully appreciated. Words of encouragement would also be a help but I really would appreciate it if people will refrain from telling me Win 8 is the spawn of the devil - if it is doubtless I'll find that out for myself eventually.
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my one hint is to make sure you have the latest touchpad drivers as the base win8 ones don't enable touchpad multi-touch for some reason.
mouse will be fine then
I have it installed on a touch-screen PC and also a non touch laptop. Obviously the touchscreen is better (for the metro interface) but they have managed to make it very easily navigable using a mouse or touchpad too
Here's the info I followed:
http://lifehacker.com/5840387/how-to-dual+boot-windows-7-and-windows-8-side-by-side
nice find
It's easy, I had Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8 all on the same machine. But I upgraded 7 to 8 so now I have XP and two 8s, one with Classic Shell and the other without :eek:
I'd create 2 or 3 partitions of at least 50GB each on your nice shiny new SSD and install Win 8 in one of them. You can move W7 across later on. Win 8 will detect W7 and offer to set up a dual boot for you even if they are on separate physical disks, it's dead easy. Foolproof IMO but back up your existing data first, just in case!
In your situation, no need to do any drive shrinking or similar messing around, as your SSD is new. It's a doddle. And if you put your main data files outside of Drive C in both operating systems (creating and formatting a new partition, doing a shrink first if you if you need to) you can use the same data in 8 as well as 7. You can just put the data anywhere outside the Windows directory if you want (so on Drive C: ) but then, it will always have a different drive letter in 7 and 8.