I have a number of machines running Dual Win10 and Win7 boot drives. If you have room in your case for multiple drives you can install both a Win 7 boot drive and a Win 10 boot drive in the same box and use the BIOS boot setting to select the drive the machine will boot to when you start your machine. And/or you can swap drives like Timothy is doing. On using XP ... It will install in Virtual Box on Win 7 and/or Win 10 and works fine in either environment. Also true for FreeDOS (and the FreeDOS - Fractint VM) I have also tested WinXP, Win7 and Win10 in VirtualBox on a MacPro Workstation and they all work fine. The Virtual Box Extensions allow XP to be very versatile in configuring your display settings so Fractint can use a big display context. On Never10 - I have tested it on a number of Win7 machines and it works great I am loving all the wonderful Fractal discussions and new fractals! (That said, I don't mind a bit of the off topic posts) On 05/18/2016 11:42 AM, Timothy Wegner wrote:

This tidbit is horrifically off topic I know so forgive me, I don't want to hijack the wonderful resumption of fractal discussion that Jim Muth has triggered (thanks Jim) with a big Windows discussion. I know there are many strongly held opinions on this subject.

Just to say that apparently when you upgrade to Windows 10, your old Windows 7 or 8.1 license still works. So I created a backup image of the pre-upgrade OS, and burned it back to a different SSD. I have a Kingwin replacement for my floppy drive that allows plugging in SSDs. So in an instant I can run either Windows 10 or Windows 8.1 depending on which SSD I plug in. I have kept both patched and up to date. I do this so, among other things, I can download data from my old Polar HRM that uses IrDA. IrDA support was removed without warning when Windows 10 was released. I can also use Media Center on the old version, which is protected from upgrade with Steve Gibson's Never10 utility.

I have given up on Windows XP because that old machine sadly died, along with my Fractint development environment. I need to create a new Fractint development environment, maybe in a virtual Machine. I have another machine with Windows 7 because I use Media Center heavily.

The point is you can have your cake and eat it too and keep your old OS when you upgrade. Good idea to have a backup anyway before upgrading.

Tim

(PS I see Mark has now weighed in. I don't want to prohibit Windows discussion since it has come up, but let's do let the OS discussion die down before too long, Tim says after having just continued it!) _______________________________________________ Fractint mailing list Fractint@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fractint

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