Dennis had a good question regarding the upgrade to Windows 10. “To revert to Windows 7 from Windows 10, why not suggest doing a dual boot? I have a dual book of Win XP and Win 7. Will the Win 10 overwrite just the Win 7 partition or both. I don’t want the XP, so how can I have the Win 10 just overwrite the SP partition so I have dual boot Win 7 and 10?”
Dennis, if you want to use the free upgrade, you’ll have to upgrade the Windows 7 system to Windows 10. You’re not getting an additional license for Windows 7, just converting that Windows 7 license to a Windows 10 license.
If you wanted to continue using Windows 7 and Windows 10 at the same time, you’d need to purchase a license for Windows 10 and download that separately. Windows 10 and 7 work fine together in a dual boot, I’m running 7 and the technical preview on my computer right now.
If you wanted to just make your computer a single operating system, just wipe the XP partition and remove the partition. Then all of that hard drive space will be returned to your Windows 7 computer for when you’re ready to upgrade it to 10.
If you want to run a dual boot of Windows 7, you can leave the computer partitioned and pay for a Windows 10 license to install over Windows XP, assuming you have enough hard drive space in that partition. Or, you could upgrade your current Windows 7 license to Windows 10 and find a copy of Windows 7 to install over your XP partition, whichever one you could get the best deal on. Though it’s getting harder and harder to find copies of Windows 7 theses days.
There is one option I can think of where you won’t have to pay. You could keep the Technical Preview on half of a dual boot. Windows will allow members of the Windows Inside program who are testing out Windows 10 to keep using it. But there is a catch. You have to keep participating in the Windows Insider program and beta test updates and changes to Windows 10. So your OS could change any time and some of those updates could still be unstable.
~ Cynthia
Hey Cynthia,
Obviously some functionality of ‘Windows 7′ will be compromised with ’10’ installation, most notably ‘Media Center’ and ‘Gadgets’ especially if individuals have data tagged to these apps. Change is never easy, but we all need to just ‘move on’, it is what it is and with all the user input vie ‘technical preview’ and Microsoft forums, is getting a little late to make your concerns known. The FUN continues!
Or you could do as I do. I have two hard drives in my computer. One has win 7 and the other has win 8.1 on it. When I boot up, I just select which OS to boot to. Of course you have to have the disc to load the OS on each hard drive, but once that is done , you just put win 10 on one and leave the other alone.
Hi,
I have a very similar issue, I have a license for W10, only that partition in my disk.
I want to install also some Linux distribution in the same disk, while keeping my license, but I don’t know how to do that. Please help 🙂
Incomplete answer. Currently have XP and 7. Can 10 only overwrite XP therefore left with 10 and 7