Thanks Joe, That's how I do it or did it. I got the Win 7 Public Beta release now with a product key that is good till August 1st, so I'm going to put Win 7 on a secondary HD, since my main HD is a 74GB WD Raptor, which doesn't give me much wiggle room for 2 OS's and long term future use, the good thing is that's it's 10,000 rpm, but for tons of software, that's small. Never tried a triple boot, interesting. grandms, the 128MB on-board graphics will be fine. I did Vista with a 32MB card and really didn't miss out on much, in fact they were selling Vista ready computers with only 32MB. If you're into 3D and gaming graphics performance like the kids, then you'll a need big buck video card, but for desktop performance for Windows Aero, you're good to go. I'm liking Win 7, sure there are preliminary bugs and crashes at times doing some things with different software and reports are sent to MS, but that's why it's beta and testing and why they released the public beta to the first 2.5 million people, to get feedback. There was a big demand and release was delayed 6-8 hours while more servers were set up to handle the traffic so you'd have a good download experience with a little speed.

Found this on another forum which may help\; Microsoft has a free download for Vitural PC. With this program running in your Windows Vista 64 bit environment, you can run a Windows XP 32 bit environment, and launch an MS DOS environment from there. Additionally, you can create as many of these virtual environments as you want. Unfortunately, Microsoft requires you to have both a Windows XP licience iand a Vista Licence if you are going to run both Vista and XP (even with one in the virtual world). If you own a regerestered copy of XP, I'm told that a work around to this potential problem is to reinstall your virtual XP environment when the preceeding one experies it's 30 day registration requirement. Or; Download virtualbox from Sun for free and run a virtual instance of win xp 32bit, win vista 32bit ...I would suspect licencing for whatever os you choose ie XP or Vista would also apply after the trial period. I have never tried this , just reporting what I have found

Tumbleweed, I bought Windows 7 just because I could. My main computer was at least 5 years old and had been given to me because the motherboard caught fire. As it was 2 years old at the time of the fire it was prudent for the company who owned it to buy a new machine rather than repair because of downtime. So I got a machine with XP Pro free and for the price of the replacement motherboard and a little of my time rebuilding I had a reasonably good machine. It has probably been close to 8 years since I built myself a new computer and Win 7 was my excuse to be extravagant, hee hee. There was no need for a new computer or operating system, just an I want situation and computers are my only vice Jane_ny, if this computer is the one you refer to on this thread then you probably would be well advised not to try upgrading it. What would you gain? Your comments on that thread suggest this is a very good computer for your needs even if it is 4 years old. To pay to have things like the install and replacing the video card would likely cost over half the price of a new computer plus you would have a worthless copy of XP because it is tied to that particular motherboard and cannot be used in any other machine. One more small note to consider, as your machines are used in business the XP computer has a book value of almost nil now and any new computer will be bought with pre tax dollars

One of the main advantages of using 64Bit Windows is it's ability to use / access more ram then a 32Bit Windows could. Put simply, a 64-bit PC can handle larger amounts of information than a 32-bit system. Since it can use more RAM 4 gigabytes (GB) and up a 64-bit computer can be more responsive when you're running lots of programs at once. Windows Vista supports both 32-bit and 64-bit software. The only design requirement would be a 64Bit Processor from Intel or AMD. I would hope the computer has a 64Bit Microprocessor, I could not imagine a computer shop making that kind of error, that is installing a 64Bit Windows with a 32 bit processor on the mother board, not even sure the install would work I guess it could.....