PC tricks

Before you start, make a backup of your data—you're going to be formatting drives and installing OSes, so anything could go wrong, and you don't want to lose your whole system. When you're ready, we'll need to create some space for Windows 8 on your hard drive. Assuming you have at least 20GB of space free on your drive, you're going to use Windows' Disk Management to set partition those 20GB for Windows 8. Open the Start Menu and right click on the "Computer" option. Click "Manage", and in the window that appears, click on "Disk Management" in the left sidebar.

Find your system hard disk in the graphical list that appears in the bottom pane. Right-click on it and then click "Shrink Volume". Shrink it down so you have at least 20GB of space left on the end of the drive, and click OK. Then, click on the "Unallocated" block of that drive that appears and click "New Simple Volume". Click Next on the next few windows until you get to the "Format Partition" window. Here, give it a volume label you'll recognize (like "Windows 8") and click Next. It should format the drive for you. Now you're all set to install Windows 8.

 You'll notice when you first boot up into Windows 8 that you're presented with a new graphical boot menu that'll let you choose between your Windows 7 and Windows 8 installations. Windows 8 will be the default, meaning if you don't manually choose Windows 7 from the menu, your computer will boot into Windows 8 after three seconds of inactivity. Chances are, you don't want to make Windows 8 the default quite yet, so here's how to make Windows 7 the default.

On the boot menu, click on the button at the bottom that says "Change Defaults or Choose Other Options", and hit "Choose the Default Operating System". From there, you can pick Windows 7 from the menu. From now on, your computer will boot into Windows 7 by default, but if you feel like playing around with Windows 8 that day, you can just pick it from the boot menu. Enjoy playing with the developer preview, and let us know what you think in the comments.