Dual Booting Question

[Ka12e3i]

Question: Would it make sense to have dual booting capabilities. For example, I have Win 7 Ultimate and enjoy playing Skyrim, watching movies on XFinity and Netflix. I have the Media Center and no issues. Believe I would have to purchase the Media Center if I upgraded to Win 8 Pro???I like the features in Win 8 Pro. I could upgrade to Win 8 Pro, however, I wish to avoid any software conflicts which I believe will occur with the upgrade. What's the best way to have the good "stuff" of both operating systems. Is there a good program out there that would let me partition my drive for dual booting. I have a i7 980 extreme processor, 6 core; 12 Gigs of Ram; 1 TB HD and a super graphics card. It's a Dell XPS 9100. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Benevolence]

Easeus Todo is a pretty good free partitioning program (easy to use) apart from GParted in Linux/WinPE Land. Most of the time doing an in-place upgrade will work fine, apart from reinstalling applications. If you want to go ahead and experiment with a dual boot, a different drive might make things easier, or you can use GRUB to select your boot partition, you'll have to set it up in Linux though with the command line.
You can upgrade to any version of Win8 you want to from an older installation, however it may or may not have the media center stuff you want depending on the version.