My introduction to the cyberworld was in the era of Windows Vista, making me a relative newcomer. When Windows 7 came out, I bought and installed in my desktop a second hard drive containing a legal copy of that OS in one of the two extra bays provided for the purpose (Turned out to be pretty simple, even for a newbie). Since then, on bootup, a black screen appears asking for a choice between the two OS’s, and defaulting to 7 after 30 seconds if I don’t select Vista. I normally choose 7, which of course is a great improvement over Vista.
Recently, I’ve been told that the two OS’s do not operate independently of each other, and that elements of both are in play when I select the W7 option at bootup. If true, it would mean that both hard drives are running, which to my (limited) understanding would slow the computer substantially. I find this somewhat curious, since the Vista OS was complete and fully functional when it was the only OS in the machine.
Further, it is interesting that the screens generated in each OS using Start>Computer show almost identical numbers on amount of disk usage, divided between local disk, OS, and recovery. However, the letters used for each of these are different between the two OS’s (Unable to determine how to add screenshots to this post).
My thought is that only one of the hard drives, with the complete and discrete Vista or 7, is running at any one time. Hard to imagine that elements of one system could migrate to the other. Could it be that the disk usage bar graphs shown are the same because the drives themselves are off-the-shelf stock items, subsequently loaded with the OS by Microsoft (or others)? And, to take that theory a step further, perhaps those bar graphs are not truly accurate, but “default” values placed by the manufacturer of the disk?
Please don’t laugh, I’m no expert, and my questions are not in jest!
