 | By Woody Leonhard I call it Windows Three-Card Monte: on a system that multi-boots three operating systems on three hard drives, how do you tell which physical drive goes with which version of Windows? There’s a trick to looking at a case full of hard drives and knowing which version of Windows is running on each drive. |
The reasons for dual- or multi-booting Windows
Dual-booting has become much more prevalent in the past few months. Millions of people want to install Windows 7, but not everybody can afford to buy a new, sufficiently endowed computer — or re-purpose an existing computer — just for Microsoft’s new OS. The obvious solution: dual- or multi-boot, which lets you choose the operating system you want to use each time you start your PC.
Although it’s most common to dual-boot Windows 7 with Vista or XP, dual-booting with two or more Windows versions ain’t the only game in town. You can also dual-boot different copies of Windows 7. For example, I have a dual-boot system set up so I can easily switch between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 on the same PC. There are also lots of good reasons to dual-boot Windows 7 and Linux.
As an alternative to dual-booting, you could create a virtual machine on your PC to run Windows 7 under Vista, for example. Doing so is very easy nowadays. However, I generally avoid running Windows 7 — or any beta software — in a virtual machine, because I never know whether the problems I encounter come from the virtualizer or from the software itself.
That said, there are many situations where running Windows in a virtual machine makes a lot of sense. Just for starters, it’s the only way I know to take screen shots of installation steps.
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