Good and Bad things about dual booting 7 and XP?

The good thing is that you have easy access to two different operating systems during boot up, ideal if you want to run some old software. (Yes I know Windows 7 has compatibility mode).

The only bad thing I can think of is the secondary OS using up your disk space. Also you might install the secondary OS incorrectly and cause a number of problems.

Dual-booting OS' is good, I've done it with different versions of Windows and Ubuntu, although the Ubuntu one didn't go so well.

bad: 7 has xp mode so duel booting is a waste

good: nothing

I can't think of a good reason to do this.

Good - Two version of windows so you can test super old hardware and screw up one OS you have a second· If your an IT technician who needs to have XP on hardware to understand user faults. (but then you will prob have enough money to have a second machine that you can lob another OS on.

Bad - Almost everything runs ok in Windows 7 from what I can see and unless you need full speed USB support (webcams seem to fail in a VM but that could be my GFX card. Although films play fine so I think it's just the link speed) or you have a really intense application that is somehow windows 7 only then you may as well put XP in a virtual machine on win 7. If you have Win 7 then why do you need XP? It's a decade old now. We don't even use IDE interface hard drives any more.

I'd say just stick with one. If there is some reason why your computer can't handle Windows 7, then just stick with XP. If it can handle Windows 7 though, stay with that. I don't know why everyone thinks XP is some incredible OS, Windows 7 is much better in most cases. I would even rather be on Vista than XP at this point, but Windows 7 is the best in my opinion. There would be no reason to upgrade if nothing changed, a lot has changed in Windows 7, so upgrading would be the best idea. No need for a dual-boot. Hope this helps.