How easy is it to revert from Ubuntu to Windows7

[RRogers92]

Hi everyone, I just recently bought a new laptop with windows7 and have office2010,
I was wondering if I installed Ubuntu how easy would it be to go back to windows7? I don't have a cd as it came on the pc.

Also does office2010 work on ubuntu,

thanks in advance

[oz]

Hi everyone, I just recently bought a new laptop with windows7 and have office2010,
I was wondering if I installed Ubuntu how easy would it be to go back to windows7? I don't have a cd as it came on the pc.

Also does office2010 work on ubuntu,

thanks in advance

Welcome to the forums!

I'd recommend looking into a method of creating a recovery CD from the contents of your current Windows install before going any further. Check with your laptop maker for the instructions to do that. If that doesn't work, you might be able to order a recovery disk from them. Another option would be to make a system image of your drive or partitions so that it can be easily restored if needed. Something like Clonezilla (Linux app) or Acronis True Image (Windows app) will work for that.

MS Office might work with Linux under Wine, but I couldn't say for sure. If you truly want to go Linux, you might want to consider using OpenOffice instead. Otherwise, you can try Wine, or you can set your machine up to dual-boot, whereby at boot time, you can choose to boot into Linux, or into Windows.

Dual-booting is often the easiest route for those new to Linux.

[Manko10]

Windows 7 ist realtively easy and fast to install in contrast to Windows XP. But you can't do it without an installation medium. But when it was on your computer when you bought it you should have got an installation CD along with it, often labeled as "Recovery CD".

I haven't tried yet whether Office 2010 works on Linux but I doubt since Wine's AppDB declares Office 2010 still being garbage.

[devils casper]

I was wondering if I installed Ubuntu how easy would it be to go back to windows7? I don't have a cd as it came on the pc.

Hi and Welcome !

I would suggest you to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. You will have both OSes and choice to boot any OS at startup.

Create free space 12-15GB for Ubuntu and install it. Ubuntu installer will detect Windows 7 and setup dual boot itself.

[Manko10]

Create free space 12-15GB for Ubuntu and install it.

Don't be too close-fisted with harddisk space. If you can spare more space then use it. I've experienced that the Linux installation grows and someday you notice that your calculation was too narrow.

[RRogers92]

ok great, thanks for the help everyone! I'll probably stick to windows7 since some programs I regularly use won't run on linux, I'll put ubuntu on the old computers that are already too slow to use with xp though.

since I just got office 2010 it would seem like a bit of a waste to not use don't you think?

Anyway thanks for the quick responses!

[devils casper]

Default Linux installation doesn't take more than 4GB space and if it's a machine for Desktop use only then 12-15GB space is more than enough, imho.

[Manko10]

Raw Linux base system without anything special takes about 250MB, with Xorg and a big desktop environment it could grow up to 4GB but as I mentioned my system even grew up to 20GB after a while of massive use (home directories not included).
My current root partition is 30GB in size where 23GB are used. My home dir partition has other 147GB in use.

[devils casper]

My current root partition is 30GB in size where 23GB are used.

I have never seen that much used space in any Desktop machine. You are really installing lot of packages.

Regarding /home partition, no comment on that. For me, 10GB is enough because I have 2x 1TB disks for other stuff and I can use as much space I need.

[oz]

My current root partition is 30GB in size where 23GB are used.

That really does seem rather HUGE, but then we do all have different uses for our machines and different ideas about what is bloat, and what isn't.

Me... I've been considering putting my super-bloated 10GB KDE4 box on a serious diet!