running Windows 7 and Linux on same laptop ?

[Richard W]

I have an older laptop with XP that I don't often use.

One possible pitfall is hardware failure. It seems that it is not uncommon for old USB systems not to be able to handle their rated data rates - nominal USB 2.0 can work as USB 1.1, but not as USB 2.0. As far as I can tell, I had that problem. The symptom was that my wifi dongle would not 'enumerate'; the Linux dmesg command brought up many such error messages. My remote USB keyboard and mouse worked fine. Neither Ubuntu 10.04 or 12.04 could handle the problem unaided, though Windows XP could, and I had to resort to manually disabling the 'ehci_hcd' driver. The solution included editing /etc/init.d/rc.local.

Apparently other symptoms include drivers having to restart.