Use virtual machines! It is one of the better "best practices" you can practice. Keep whatever Windows came with your computer, install VMWare, and then spin

Use virtual machines! It is one of the better "best practices" you can practice. Keep whatever Windows came with your computer, install VMWare, and then spin up a new virtual machine to experiment/test in whatever other OS you want w/o mucking-up your base OS. Plus, if you hose your virtual machine, it is easy to revert it to a previous, okay, state by restoring to a snapshot.