[BloodlessDawn]

Hi everyone.

I am going to be buying a new computer within the next year, hopefully.

I am somewhat dissapointed with the latest release of Windows. So I have been looking at many alternatives.
Linux seems to be the obvious alternative, but it lacks (just some of) the compatability that windows has.
This leads me to wanting to Dual Boot my computer.

Now...
What I want to do, is have 1 drive for each OS + applications, and 1 drive for files (music, pictures, documents).

I want the files (music, pictures, documents) accessible from both Operating Systems.

How easy is this going to be?
I'm fairly competent with computers and this may be a lot easier than I think, but I'd rather know now: before buying all the components and finding out I've done it wrong.

What I ideally want (whether I end up having just one operating system, or not)
Is to have a small (around 150GB) 10,000RPM drive, for the Operating System (and other OS specific applications).
And then a larger (probably 1TB, at 7,200RPM) HDD for file storage.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

[Hybr!d]

What exacly don't you like about Vista?

[Carbon]

Accessible? Easy.
But the separate OSs won't be able to co-inhabit My Documents, together, for example.

I have, right now, two HDDs - one 80gb with XP and some programs, C:\, and a 500GB F:\ which has 30gb or so partitioned off as drive V. I keep my music on F, my XP pagefile on F, my Vista pagefile on C:\, and have separate documents folders (this is a pain but nothing can fix it). Both OS's programs now go to F:\Program Files. I then changed permissions on both My Documents folders so that the other OS' user could access and execute them. It's a pretty decent solution.

Just remember - given a specific program installed on one OS, the other won't have the registry entries for it. You may be able to install the software on one OS then run the installer on the other OS on the same folder to get the registry entries: this is only needed for some apps, most basic stuff will run fine if you just start the exe. And of course you can install programs to separate folders, if one's a Vista version and one's an XP or something.

I would recommend against a 10k RPM drive right now as the 640GB WD for example is close enough to it that you probably won't notice and is an excellent, probably the best price per GB right now. Two 640GBs should allow redundancy if you want to install all programs separately as well as protection against drive failure - if one drive goes down, you can use the other OS to run recovery software on it, for example.