Windows 7, Successor To Vista, May Ship Next Year

If you want to use multiple OS's and try out new OS's the best thing to do is run them as virtual OS's using software like VMware server which is free.

It's much simpler than trying to setup dual boot's as it uses virtual drivers often ones that suit the OS you are using so you don't have to mess around finding compatible drivers.

Another good point for testing and development is the use of snap shots, were you can tack a snap shot do what ever you need and if you mess up you can just restore the virtual haddrive to were it was when you made the snap shot.

We are big fans virtulization here at Web Wiz. Instead of heaving multiple servers round the office for development, VOIP, Active Directory, etc. we now have just 1 Quad-Core Server running, Windows Small Business Server, Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard, Windows Server 2008 Standard, CentOS, and any other OS's we need to add for development work.

I've not seen it course any issues on Vista, and you can always uninstall it quite easily.

However, because Vista is power hungry you may want to run it on an XP machine unless you have lots of spare RAM.

The server I mention running in our office running lots of servers OS's has over 8Gig of RAM. To do this we have the Host OS running Windows 2003 Server x64 so it can address larger amounts of memory.

To run Linux though you can just give the Guest OS 256 or 512MB of memory as it doesn't require allot to run.