Two parallel Win7 installations best practice?

[audioworld]

sorry if this has been answered recently, but its hard to type a search term for this:

My brand new Laptop (HP8540w) has win7 64bit on it, but from previous experience I like to have a separate OS installation just for music performance (no internet, no scanner, most services disabled) and another one for general usage. On my last install I used ACRONIS Disk Director to first CLONE the OS on the same harddrive (so I didnt need a second OS licence), and then ACRONIS Disk Director to switch between those two OSes on startup. This approach worked quite well, but introduced a couple of side-problems:
- Harddisc space is wasted, and dissolves quickly as many files are doubled
- after some time I didnt know any more which files are where (especially on the desktop)
- Authorization of Audio Apps without Internet access is very tedious
- downloading and trying out new plugins and toys is very tedious

As such, I have the following questions:
- do you all perform live with LIVE with your "Internet-Enabled" OS?
- are there better solutions than ACRONIS to clone and dual-boot?
- do you virtualise or use any other tricks to make LIVE stable during performance?

Thanks for any hints and tipps,
karl.

[nebulae]

well, there goes 30gb of space, for no real benefit.

[audioworld]

well, there goes 30gb of space, for no real benefit.

Yes, exactly, in my current installation it is even 60GB.

So are you using Ableton live on stage with your normal Windows OS installation? With all those services which add up over time runnning in the background (adobe updater, java updater, virus scan, ipod service, Quicktime task, multiple svchosts, etc....)???

It would be very kind if someone could answer this, please.

[nebulae]

^that's a very good point. I have two computers - a workstation and a laptop, both running XP. My laptop is my day-to-day worhhorse. I have all that crap running on it. When I perform with it, I manually disable the services I don't need. Of the services you mentiond:
adobe updater, java updater, virus scan, ipod service, Quicktime task - all of those take two seconds to right-click and kill. So I generally do that, as well as disable screensavers before a gig.

On my workstation, I don't run any of that stuff. But again, most of those things aren't a big deal in terms of system drain. So I don't worry about it.