I have purchased a refurbished compaq presario with Vista home installed.

I need to run a proprietary software for business that was written for W98.

A suggestion was made that by dual booting the computer I can avoid the driver problems problems that would develop if I just wiped Vista and loaded W2K. This scares me a a bit because I have had many problems in the past when I messed around with operating systems since I lack the requsite skills and knowledge to even consider myself an amature geek. So before proceeding in the valley of the shadow etc, I'm wondering if anyone has any stray thoughts on the matter. There is no rush because I have 28 days to decide whether I want to keep the computer or look around for another refurbished with XP instead of Vista. Many thanks in advance.

Here's a good tutorial about this.
http://www.syschat.com/dual-boot-vis...eady-1946.html

An easier solution bay me to run it in Vista in a virtual machine like one of these.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...c/default.mspx

Parallels Workstation 2.2 for Windows & Linux

Desktop Virtualization, Virtual Machine, Virtual PC, Desktop Security, Mac Virtualization - VMware

Thanks for the tutorial - just one minor problem: when I right cllick the start menu I do not get a "manage" option on the popup menu - this is the home basic ver is it possible that the partitioning tool is not availabe with the home version??????

Thanks for the tutorial - just one minor problem: when I right cllick the start menu I do not get a "manage" option on the popup menu - this is the home basic ver is it possible that the partitioning tool is not availabe with the home version??????

GParted -- LiveCD

This is one of the best partitioning tools on the market and is free and easy to use. You burn the program to disc (live CD) and boot to it and it will repartition your harddrive so as to make room for the other operating systems.

I find that using a great boot manager instead of the ones that comes with windows makes it so much easier to install other bootable operating system as this way dowsn't cause MBR issues between operating systems.

I use bootIt NG from terabyte unlimited which is a partitioning tool and boot manager but it costs to use it....
This is a free boot manager that will also serve the purpose of allowing other bootable operating systems

Download GAG 4.9 - free boot manager. Allows boot of up to 9 different operating systems - Softpedia

Together this makes a different approach to dual booting any other operating systems.