Dual Boot - XP Media & Vista Ultimate

[FoF404]

I built a PC a few months ago and installed XP Media Center as my OS. I now got a free copy of Vista Ultimate from Microsoft for doing some surveys. I'd like to reformat the hard drives (a 750gb & a 500gb) and reinstall XP and Vista as a dual boot system. I have never ran dual operating systems, so I'm looking for a few pointers if anyone has any. I believe I read that installing XP first is the way to go.

I also have a few questions:

How should I partition the drives? Would two 50gb partitions be good for both OS's?

There are a few programs I'd like to run in each OS to see what I get better performance with. Do I need to install these programs separately in each OS? Can saved files from these programs be shared between OS's? What about music and pictures in my shared documents folders, can they be accessed from either OS?

Thanks for any insight or advice you can provide!!

 

[oscar6]

This link may be of some help.
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2184734&enterthread=y

 

[Scarpozzi]

50GB is fine for each partition.

You can't share programs between Operating Systems because of the registry entries. I'm doing the same thing with my system, but picked one Operating System to host my documents/my music/etc and saved space that way.