Will Dual Booting Void Your Warranty Or Slow Down Your PC?

I personally love dual booting my computers – both my laptop and my Homelab NAS have dual boots (my laptop is a Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22 dual boot, whereas my NAS is a Windows 11 and Debian 12 dual boot – with Debian being the main OS).

Dual booting your operating systems can be a great way of getting extra power and flexibility from your system, while avoiding some of the issues that virtual machines (VMs) introduces. But every so often, dual boots WILL cause you problems. So I discuss these topics and more in this video, and also specifically discuss if dual booting can make your PC slower – and void your computer’s warranty.

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone, I’m a big fan of dual booting. Both my laptop and my Homelab NAS have both Windows AND Linux installed on them, allowing me to freely switch between both operating systems. It kinda gives the best of both worlds – especially if you’ve interested in testing out Linux for example, but you don’t quite have the confidence to completely nuke Windows yet. But some people still have concerns. For example, if you have a Dell or HP laptop which had Windows preinstalled, would you void your warranty if you then install Ubuntu or Mint on it? And can dual booting actually slow down your PC? Well I wanted to cover those questions AND MORE in today’s video, because while dual booting is USUALLY good (and has no issues at all), there certainly are some downsides to it – in SOME cases.

Does Dual Booting Affect Performance?

So firstly, can your computer’s speeds or performance be harmed by installing multiple operating systems on it? Well, the way that operating systems are installed on your computer is that the data drive inside your system gets “split up” into different bits – this is known as disk partitioning. Technically you could buy MULTIPLE hard drives or SSDs and install them in your computer and then put install Windows on one drive, and Linux on another (for example), but in reality you often just partition the disk – it’s easier. Whichever method you use though, with a DUAL BOOT you can only boot up into ONE operating system at a time. Either Windows OR Linux, but never both. You choose this when your computer is starting up. If you want to run both at exactly the same time, you need to look at virtual machines and I discuss this point towards the end of this video.

But since you can only boot into one OS when DUAL BOOTING, you’re never going to have a situation where your computer is waaay slower because it’s trying to run loads of different operating systems at the same time. That’s because of how your CPU, RAM and disk space works. Programs and operating systems are installed on your data drives, and everything on there just “sits there” unused until it’s actually getting opened up. When you then open up Chrome, or boot up into Mint for example, this then gets loaded into memory – the RAM. Your CPU will also need to do work to open and run this program or operating system.

Now it’s your CPU and RAM that will become slow if you try to do too much. If you open 10 browsers and each has 100 tabs (you just go crazy!), your computer will become REALLY slow because the CPU and RAM will be maxed out and struggle to manage this. The same is true of operating systems – if you used virtual machines to run multiple OSes, then your CPU and RAM could get maxed out, resulting in your computer getting really slow.

BUT since you can only run ONE operating system at a time when dual booting, this isn’t an issue. There’s no inherent reason why your computer will get slower simply because you have installed two (or more) operating systems on it. In many cases, running a dual boot can be a great idea because Linux runs much faster than Windows 10 and 11. For example my 6 year old laptop is a bit slow when running Windows 11, but it’s super fast when I boot up into Ubuntu. So in my case, having a dual boot means that I can SPEED UP my PC – by not using Windows. So that’s great.

There’s only ONE real way that a dual boot can slow down your computer, and that’s if you end up maxing out your disk space when you install multiple operating systems. If your drives are full up, then this can result in poor performance. In this case you’ll probably want to try uninstalling unused programs, and reviewing how much swap space (or pagefile) configuration that your system has allocated because this directly uses up disk space. But in all other cases, a dual boot shouldn’t affect performance at all.

Can Dual Boots Void Your Warranty?

Now we come to the harder question: can it impact your computer’s warranty? Well it’s impossible for me to say for sure because there are hundreds (or probably, thousands) of companies that build computers. I can’t say with 100% certainty that every single one of them will allow dual booting, for example.

In general though, dual booting a desktop or laptop PC is just a software change. It doesn’t affect the physical hardware INSIDE the system. So if I dual booted my computer the moment I received it, and 6 months later my CPU died, a REPUTABLE computer company should have no issue taking the computer back, examining it and then fixing it for free under the warranty. That’s what reputable companies should do.

HOWEVER not all tech companies are honest and reputable, and not every repair technician is super experienced. For example ASUS have quite a bad reputation with returns and RMAs, so I wouldn’t really trust them personally if I purchased an ASUS Windows laptop, then I installed Linux and shipped it back to them with a hardware fault.

All it takes is ONE inexperienced – or dishonest – repair tech to say that you’ve made an unauthorized change to your computer, and then you’re kinda stuck.

YES you might be able to appeal any initial decision, but it will delay things and that’s EXTRA time that you’re then without your work or personal computer – which isn’t ideal.

So here’s the thing. Most “Windows computers” from the big tech companies will come with a built-in recovery partition that allows you to easily restore your computer back to the default factory state – basically, back to just having Windows installed on it and nothing else. Or sometimes they’ll give you a recovery USB that you insert into your computer, go into the boot menu, and restore your PC from that USB. Either way, if I needed to return a dual booted computer or laptop, I would always restore it BEFORE shipping it back. It will just make things easier and quicker all round.

Other Downsides Of Dual Booting

That’s all great, then: your PC shouldn’t be any slower, and your warranty should still be in-place, if you dual boot. Noice. So are there ANY downsides to dual booting? Well there are a few that you should probably be aware of.

Firstly, running a dual boot set-up IS a bit more complicated than simply keeping whatever OS your laptop came with. That’s because dual booting will modify the way that your computer starts up – it changes the UEFI boot up process, and adds a certain bootloader so that you can select which operating system to use on start-up. This often works well enough, but sometimes if you “repair” your OS, this boot loader can then just completely disappear – and then you’re stuck loading straight to a single operating system. This is especially true when reinstalling or repairing Windows, because Microsoft doesn’t really play nice with other operating systems. It’s likely to just say “meh, let’s put our own boot loader in place – screw any other operating system”. You THEN need to boot into a Linux USB to repair the Grub boot loader, which is annoying. This has happened to me multiple times (always with Windows), and it sucks every single time. Linux is much better in this sense – because it detects that Windows is installed, and ensures that its own boot loader (called Grub) keeps Windows listed so you don’t have any problems.

Secondly, a dual boot means that your hard drive or SSD will become a bit “messy” due to all the different partitions that get created. Now this doesn’t matter for day to day usage of the system, but if you find that you’re running out of disk space and need to resize something, it can get quite difficult to manage – especially when you have three or more operating systems installed (because you have to try and work out which partition belongs to which operating system).

The final “risk” of dual booting is that you end up with slightly more “risk” to your computer. I’m not trying to be controversial here or anything, but the more software you have, the more risk you have. If you mainly boot up into Linux, for example, you might find that your Windows install is VERY out of date when you go to boot up – with dozens of packages needing to be installed or updated when you DO boot back into it.

Is Running Linux In A VM Better?

So with all that said, should you just run your other operating systems in a virtual machine instead? For example, you could enable the virtualization options within Windows, download Virtual Box and then run Linux Mint easily enough as a virtual machine. That would work well, right?

Well yes it would, sort of. It WOULD be easier and quicker than dual booting, and if you then decide that you didn’t like Mint, you can just delete the VM and carry on with Windows. Simple. HOWEVER as I mentioned towards the start of this video, running VMs will use up more of your CPU and memory (your RAM). That’s because if your hardware is maxed out, your computer will struggle to run properly. That’s why I tend to prefer just dual booting, but VMs certainly are great at trying out lots of different operating systems first. After all, you can’t know what you don’t know. There’s literally hundreds of Linux distributions out there, so if you have never used Linux at all, it would definitely make sense to get a VM and try out some different Linux distributions FIRST, and then once you find your favorite, I would THEN dual boot it. You kinda get the best of both worlds with this method.

I use Arch by the way.

Kidding. Linux humor, Linux humor. Good times..!