Thanks, Larry. I'll take a look at that as a concept for my laptop. My desktop runs fine with Win10, but I have multibooted.

I've got two 1TB 7200RPM disks (there are two bays in the laptop) and they are getting seriously full with just one O/S. (LOL)

I've pondered going to 1.5 or 2TB drives, but if I want the speed of 7200RPM, it gets prohibitively expensive, and 5400 just seems to run slow. SSD is great for speed, but I would lose a drive bay to a lower capacity disk (as I certainly can't afford the higher capacity ones at this time).

Are your Win7 and Win10 on the same physical drive, or two separate drives? I used to dual boot my desktop by installing one O/S on one physical drive and the other on a different physical drive. Then all I had to do was go into POST setup and change boot order to get the O/S I want.

I've been thinking about running some of my disk content (data/sound libraries/etc) on an external USB (I could use eSATA, but I lose the portableness of the laptop then) and do a dual boot between Win7 and Win10. Also, that needs backed up also, and USB to USB backup is painfully slow for a lot of data.

But my concern is if I get black screened again on Win10, then even though all the application files may be on a D: drive (for example), I would still need to re-install everything to re-establish everything that goes into the C: drive registry.

I used to dual boot between Win7 and XP on my desktop; however, stopped for the same reason (losing my restore points, even though I also use Acronis - and they just sent me a great offer that I may take them up on). smile

I do have some spare (lower capacity disks) big enough to hold the O/S's, so I may be able to experiment.

Thinking out loud, I wonder if I could take a Win7 installation, clone it to the second disk, then just do a Win10 in place upgrade on the second disk to quickly get a dual boot (with apps installed to a different partition). That would get most of the apps' registry information into Win10 without too much pain (and when I did the in place upgrade when Win10 first came out, even many of my license authorizations transferred). If that worked, I could just repeat the process if I ever had a problem in the future (take an Acronis image of Win7, say, apply it to the second disk, boot from that one, then do an in place upgrade to Win10. Microsoft already has my machine ID for Win10, so re-installation and licensing should not be a problem.

I do have some iLok libraries, and I may have to break down and get the iLok dongle, as in the above scenario, it would be a lot of releasing licenses and adding them back in (I'm not sure what iLok tags to). The dongle would eliminate that. I already have one USB dongle from Steinberg for Cubase Artist and for some of their sound libraries I own (Halion, for example).

You've given me some stuff to think about and probably waste a little of my time, but it will be fun.

BTW, I do still run XP on occasion, but just do it as a VM in VMWare.

Bottom line though (if anyone has even read this much) is that I'm not anti-Win10; it's just extremely frustrating when it has been working fine for over a year, then you sit and watch it do a bunch of l-o-o-o-o-n-g updates (because, well you just booted it and want to use it), and then it won't boot at all. And you find lots and lots of other folks are having the same problem. Mine, I guess, is the reverse problem...I want the new operating system to run on my old hardware (versus this thread, which is old operating systems running on new hardware).

John

Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 8TB SSD
Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 11TB SATA

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