On Friday last week I decided to give Windows 7 RC a shot, so I downloaded it and burned it to DVD. My plan was to dual boot with Win XP Pro and Ithought I’d check to see if anyone had done something similar. Fortunately the Windows 7 Center has a lot of articles and this one in particular provides a lot of useful info.
One of the main things I needed to do before anything was to create a new partition for Windows 7 and using the advice from Windows 7 Center I downloaded and installed EASEUS Partition Master 3.5. Using this program I created a new 50G partition for Win7 RC. The actual installation process was harmless and following the installation prompts and advice from Windows 7 Center I got Win7 installed without an issue.
Now this ain’t a review on Win7 RC, but to me it looks Vista and it seems to use less processing power but this is just my subjective comments. Happy I had it installed though, I planned to come back and install my AV and Office and try Win7 until it ran out ~March 2010, so I shut down for the night.
So the next day I came back and fired up my PC, and to my dismay it wouldn’t start 
I just got the Windows start up screen, but it wouldn’t go any further. I then tried the various boot options, including Repair, but nothing helped. As I was dual-booting though I could still get back to WinXP though. After some frustration I decided to go back to just XP, although that wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.
In the past I’ve dual-booted XP with Linux and Solaris and returning to just XP was easy enough. After firing up from the Windows XP CD I could go to Repair mode and do FIXMBR and my boot.ini was rewritten, this didn’t work in this case, it seems Win7 has it’s own start-up process. After much searching I found this on ‘My Digital Life‘. Following the instructions I was able to get back to the WinXP boot record and I’m happily running XP again.
So was it worth it? Not really for me. Win7 looks OK but I’m not unhappy with XP. XP is the best MS OS I’ve used and unless I’m forced to change I won’t. Whenever support runs and I don’t get security updates anymore then I’ll consider changing, but I’m not sure I’ll pay and change to another MS OS. Solaris or Linux might be options then.
Filed under: tech thoughts , EASEUS Partition Master, technology, windows 7 dual boot, windows 7 RC, Windows XP
[...] 1, 2009 I previously posted about giving Windows 7 a try and it didn’t work out well for me, and I said when I had to [...]