Since you only have this hidden recovery stuff, I would definitely create a good set of partition images before touching anything. There can be number of hidden dependencies in that recovery setup. Like only 3 partitions, laid out exactly as now, etc.

Whatever you do, you need to test the the recovery process after re-partitioning, so you *will* loose your current setup. So create those HD images before you do anything else.

I don't know about Paragon for HD imaging - I have had good experience with Acronis.

My advice would be to try the virtualization stuff first. See if you get decent performance. You can even run your Linux install inside a virtual machine.

9x is out of the question at least as far as being a host os. Works fine in VPC/Vmware/VirtualBox except of course no Direct3D support.

Most games run fine in Vista except that there will be no DirectSound3D support. Since your using a laptop and will likely only use stereo sound anyway you probably won't even notice.

The 9x games that complain about d3drm.dll can easily be fixed by copying the .dll from XP into Vista.

You may encounter an issue where the installer for some games will not work.....but this usually affects demos for older games and not retail games. The only fix so far is to use Uniextract/7zip to decompress the data or install on another computer and copy over. (Like I said this doesn't happen very often though).

Just as in previous versions of Windows copy protection is always a PITA. Just make sure you know where gamecopyworld is at because you will have issues with your retails cd's not working in Vista due to copy protection issues.

Occasionally you may have to disable Aero on some games or switch to 16bit color for some games but this is also rare...

I'd say if all of your programs\games work in Vista then you should not bother with XP on that laptop. If something bothers you with Vista then you can always disable it. Make sure you patch Vista with all of the latest patches otherwise it will be slow, but if you patch it then it'll run decently.

So do a Vista/Ubuntu dual-boot......and focus on using Ubuntu more than Vista if at all possible. That way on the day MS falls (and we'll all be dancing in the streets) you won't be totally in the dark and hey you won't have to put up with all the pains of Windows.

Thanks, MiniMax and DosFreak.

Hmm. If it's not that bad with Vista's compatibility, I guess first I'll try to get as much games running on Vista as possible.
Originally I planned to use XP for working and everyday use; now I'll try to remove all of Vista's annoying issues and see how it goes.

DosFreak, I checked your PC games compatibility list, and Vista (32bit x86) WDDM has better compatibility than Vista (32bit x86) XDDM. Do I understand that right: when using the newest Nvidia drivers, I'm running in WDDM mode?

For Vista (32bit x86) WDDM, there are 19 games in the list that require Qemu to work. What exactly does this mean? Do you use Qemu to install a virtual OS, e.g. Win98?
Is Qemu better suited for games than Virtual PC, Vmware and VirtualBox?
Do you have a frontend for Qemu to recommend?

I guess when the need arises, I can always use Qemu to virtually install XP, Win98 or Linux? Then I don't even need to repartition my HD at this point.

The only thing that wouldn't work in a virtual OS is accelerated 3D graphics, because the virtualizers emulate only a 2D card? Do you think a 3D graphics card will be emulated in the near future of those projects?

Hmm, don't make any concerte judgements on my list between different Vista's. I haven't completed testing yet and alot of the testing that I perform is on a Dell D520 laptop which only has a 945gm video chipset that doesn't support T&L. It's possible that the games that are listed as working on the WDDM list are the ones that I tested on my desktop computer with an ATI X800 or Geforce 8800 video card.

I use Qemu when possible instead of VPC/Vmware because Qemu is completely free and can be use on more operating systems and the chances of it dropping support for older OS'S is much less than with VPC/Vmware.

As for being better suited for games.....it's pretty much equal to the other emulators out there. The above reason is why I like it the most.

I use Qemu Manager for a frontend but if you want a frontend included already with another free emulator then VirtualBox is a great choice, unfortunately VirtualBox doesn't support Windows 9x that well.

3D graphics is being worked on for virtualizers/emulators but it will be awhile. There's already some patches for Qemu/Virtualbox that eneabled OpenGL support in the guest but they are not official yet. DosBox supports Glide for DOS games and hopefully if we ever have stable suypport for 9x in DosBox we can get glide for windows working as well.

There are rumoors that MS may in clude their hypervisor from Windows 2008 into their next client OS which possibly might support 3d accelerator due to the next revision of WDDM.

At Microsoft, there is somewhere a document describing how to install Win98 together with Win2000.

I hope this helps.

Maybe this helps as well: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/217210/EN-US/