Windows 7 has proved to be quite the drastic improvement over Vista, enough that it even has XP stragglers crawling out of the woodwork to check it out. Your chance to test drive the release candidate is now running thin, in fact, if you haven"t tried the new OS until now you are better off postponing your plans for a week and installing the real thing. The final version of Windows 7 has already been sent to partners and is scheduled to debut publicly later this week on October 22.
Even if have pre-ordered Microsoft"s latest OS, installing it on top of your existing copy of Windows may feel a bit premature if you haven"t been running the beta or RC as your main installation. Thankfully, setting up a dual boot configuration is both easy and practical. If you"re looking for a quick and dirty, yet thorough how-to on getting Windows 7 to run alongside your installation of XP or Vista, read on.
Now that Windows 7 is creeping up on general availability, you"ll probably want to remove your RC installation. I assume most of you interested are running these pre-release versions in a dual boot configuration, and so this directly corresponds to our dual boot guide.
Because we originally developed this guide when Microsoft was releasing Windows 7 betas and release candidates, we aim at removing those versions in favor of the now nearly available final version. It should be mentioned however that you could potentially follow the same guidelines as explained below to remove your older XP or Vista installations (while in a dual boot configuration) in favor of Windows 7 Final.
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