I wanted to try out Windows 7 on my PC but don't want to remove my existing Windows XP installation, because some of my softwares run only on XP. So are there any disadvantages in having multiple OS on a single PC? Thanks
as long as you have seperate hard drive partitions for each OS its perfectly fine. I have been running PCs with multiple OS's for quite some time and its really a good option.
No, just install Windows 7 to another disk and you will not face any problems. The system will automatically create boot menu so you will have an opportunity to chose between two operating systems
have more than one operating system on one computer affect the processor and ram, until eventually the computer will be damaged
get two disks if you want it to be faster. hda - partition 1 - Grub bootloader hda - part 2 -osx hab - win7 love it
Not really, I've had multiple windows and linux on the same machine... you end up using only one in the end but if you have the disk space it's not a big problem
Only real downside to having 2 OS on one computer is the use of HDD space and of course having programs in one install but not the other. As long as its done on separate partitions you won't have any issues.
It depends on your needs. If you use just one OS like Windows, it will be a waste of hard disk space to install a second OS like Ubuntu. On the other hand, if you need to run Windows and Ubuntu applications regularly, then, you should be installing both OS.
You need to be carefull when sharing disk between two different OS. For example, when you save in different OS some files on NTFS partition and filename contains some chars Windows "doesn't like", chkdsk will delete these files !