As I am involved with customer support for PCs, I am looking to get some experience with Windows 7, now that it is fairly finalized. I guess the thread title says it all. Thanks!
Yes, it will overwrite your bootloader with its own and it should preserve the XP boot entry, if not its pretty easy to modify it to do so.
You’ll need to partition your disk to get 7 on there. 7 needs its own partition. I believe the installer is just like the vista one so it will ask you if you want to do this and redo the partition. No need for gparted or partition magic or other 3rd party utilities.
If you don’t have a copy of the Windows 7 Release Candidate, it’s too late to download it from MicroSoft, but you can still get a CD Key for it and then find the RC download from someone who already got it.
Incidentally, I’m loving my Windows 7 RC on my laptop, although it sometimes has problems waking up from hibernation similar to what I have getting up from bed some mornings, just sorta sitting there with a blank screen for a few minutes before flashing the logon screen at me.
Yeah, you shouldn’t have any trouble with a dual-boot.
If you’ve got an MSDN license, all versions of 7 RTM were made available for download just the other day. As Raguleader said though, you might not be able to source a legit beta any longer. Obviously you can get it if you know where to look.
The public beta they put out (was this RC1? I forget) was build 7100 and RTM is build 7600, I believe. You won’t find too many differences between 7xxx and RTM beyond minor bug fixes, so if you can find a copy of the RC somewhere it should go a long way towards getting you familiar with the OS
Well, according to Microsoft, installing RC from XP requires a clean install, but I see other sites that say you can dual boot it. As far as downloading the RC, I am doing it right now from Microsoft, so, contrary to other posters here, perhaps they extended the deadline. It now says August 20th.
The clean install just means it won’t upgrade the XP partition. It installs on a different partition as a clean install.
Why don’t you just get Microsoft Virtual PC? It’s free and you can put Windows 7 on it. Solves your entire problem.