Windows 7 RC (release candidate) has been available for several months now. I’ve downloaded two copies, one worked and the other didn’t. Ahead of the official release date in October, Microsoft would let you download this trial version to test drive until March 2010. I figured that seven or eight months of free computing from Microsoft wasn’t a bad idea, even if I don’t plan on buying the final release later on. The trial version will actually work until September 2010 but after March it will run for two hours and then stop, kind of like most versions of Windows anyway, right?
Before you can install a trial version of anything, you have to use a new hard drive or another partition on your current hard drive. For me, it was simpler and cheaper to install Windows 7 on my desktop, for which I already had another 200 gig SATA drive than to partition my newer 250 gig SATA drive. Windows 7 installation sets up a dual boot process which simplifies everything. Now, when I’m booting my desktop, I choose either my old XP Media Center Edition or the new Windows 7 Ultimate.
On my laptop, however, I wasn’t fortunate enough to have another hard drive so I had to figure out how to partition my old 250 gig drive. As it turns out, this was very simple, thanks to Vista’s cool partitioning app. XP doesn’t have it so you are on your own with it but if you have Vista you’re in luck. Here’s how you do it.
On my laptop I already had two partitions on my hard drive, one large one for Vista and everything else that I use daily as well as a small 12 gig one for the HP recovery on my laptop. Since I’ve had the laptop for well over a year, and I have already made up the recovery DVDS, I didn’t feel that I needed the recovery partition any more.
Step one is to go to your Control Panel. Double click on Administrative Tools. Double click on Computer Management and click once on Disk Management in the left pane. Just to the right, in the bigger pane, a visual representation of your drives will show up after Vista ‘populates’ the list. In my case, I saw two partitions and two drives. The second drive was my CD/DVD drive, by the way, and your setup would be quite similar.
Next, I formatted the Recovery partition. Before you do something like this, make sure you are positive that you want to get rid of everything on the partition you decide to format. Once you format it, everything on it is gone. Right click the partition and choose ‘Format’ and then choose NTFS as the file system. After you agree to all of the things that Vista will ask you, “Are you sure you want to do this”, etc., you will have a clean partition that is the same size as the old one.
In my case, since the old partition was only 12 gigs, I felt that I needed to make it larger. I probably chose the wrong way to do this but it worked. You can’t argue with success, right?
My next post will describe the steps to get a completely new and larger partition on the same drive that your current version of Windows is installed on. Back in a bit!