Are you able to install a second SSD in your laptop? If you really need to keep it around, it's best practice to have Windows on its own physical drive.

Or if it's feasible, make your old laptop your dedicated Windows machine.

The pain of keeping it around will outweigh the pain of needing it and not having it.

Quick boot into windows to help a friend test something on your machine?

• Twenty-five bajillion updates since you never logged in
• Windows "helpfully" cleaning up your Linux bootloader
• Any shared NTFS partition between windows and Linux is almost guaranteed to be left in a "dirty" state when windows shuts down, meaning you have to run ntfsfix before Linux will mount it again

And suddenly, that's where you'll be spending the whole afternoon. I agree with the others who say a VM is probably good enough.

Virtual Machine.

My laptop came with Windows 11, I nuked it and installed Linux before even booting lol.

Troubleshooting for friends or getting paid for playing a kernel level game in my case.