When is an upgrade a fresh install?

I had had enough of Win 7 Pro's drearily slow startup on my Lenovo laptop so, already having Win 8 Pro on another machine and knowing how much more quickly it boots I decided to splash out £79 on a Win 8 Pro upgrade from Amazon. But having pulled this off once before I really wanted to end up not with an upgrade but with both 7 and 8 in dual boot.

So first I created a 75GB partition and installed Win 8.1 Preview in dual boot, and from the Win 8.1 Preview system I ran the Win 8 Pro upgrade. Sure enough Win 8 Pro upgraded the Win 8.1 Preview, not the Win 7 Pro system, and I now have both my original Win 7 Pro and Win 8 Pro in dual boot.

I'm not sure quite where this fits with the EULA but if M$ allow it it's OK with me. Thought some of you may be interested.

p.s. I think you could do this by installing any of the qualifying upgrade systems - XP, Vista or Win7 - and it would work, though I wasn't at all sure it would work with the Win 8.1 Preview, but doing it this way is a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a full retail disk

 

In all honesty i don't like a dual boot system it will slow system down even more.I will either switch from xp or windows 7 i have two different hard drive setup that way.Once Xp goes to the drink i might switch over to windows 7 don't know yet going to wait till see what is going to happen with xp.

 

Have to differ with you there. All the machines here have at least dual boot, one triple. It doesn't affect boot times or how they run. I like to try different dual boot schemes so one system uses Grub4DOS, another EasyBCD, and this Lenovo uses the Microsoft system. Grub4DOS is by far superior.

But for those who fancy dual boot this is a way of doing it on the cheap.