Will windows 7 screw up system recovery? -

I currently have windows xp on my laptop and I was thinking about giving windows 7 a go just to try a change. Now with my windows xp sp 2. When i turn on my laptop i can hit F11 and it returns my laptop to the day i bought it. (very useful!!) It is a gateway laptop. Now my question is if i install windows 7 will it take this feature away from me? Thanks a lot. Also does anything know if i can use my external drive to install linux and run it off the external drive?

There are two partitions on your hard drive. The small one (usually around 5GB or so) is the recovery partition. As long as you don t delete or format that partition when installing WIndows 7, you ll be fine. You can install any operating system on any storage device (portable hard drive, sd card, usb stick) just as long as your motherboard supports booting from an external device. If it does, install away! It s not a quot;hiddenquot; partition. You can easily delete it if you don t know what you are doing! When you install any OS it shows all partitions on the hard drive. Make sure you choose the only obvious one that has your current OS and all of your data (I m assuming you already backed everything up?)

I don t think it will because when you hit F11 it is accessing a hidden partition. I can t see why it wouldn t just reinstall using the recovery method.