Due to a variety of reasons, it is not currently possible to upgrade our work laptops to Windows7 – we’re skipping Vista and want to be ready for Windows7 when it is released in the near future.  As an alternative to using Windows7 as the main host OS I was thinking about dual booting the laptops to the different OS’s but that would mean some messy editing of disk partitions.

However, watching the Microsoft Edge demonstration of installing Windows7 to a VHD and then booting from that I got my hopes up. Unfortunately we use Truecrypt to encrypt out hard disks, and as the video demonstrates, you have to boot from the Windows7DVD which of course is not going to support TrueCrypt enabled drives.

My next thought was to temporarily decrypt the drive, install and then encrypt the drive with Truecrypt again – I think this will work but I was planning on storing the VHD file on a usb drive (for portability and the fact that my laptop hard drive is always full) but it looks like this won’t work according to Scott Hanselman’s post where he talks about doing something similar. So I guess I’ll have to wait until I can get a large hard drive for the laptop 🙁