XP/Vista Dual Boot Questions

Hello, I have a few questions regarding setting up a dual booting with XP and Vista.

After researching around it seems gaming in general is still better on XP than Vista, although I want the DX10 capabilities with some of the newer games on Vista, but still be able to play older games on XP. I'm also going to have 4GB of RAM so XP wouldn't be able to utilize it all. (except XP x64 which I've researched around various other websites/forums and it seems most say it has a lot of issues with drivers and such)

So I mostly probably will be using Vista for everyday use and the newer DX10 games, but want to hop on XP to play some older games and maybe do benchmarking on XP like 3dmark and such since i've seen better scores on it than Vista.

So how would one go about doing this? If I have a Raid 0 setup on say (2) 320GB drives and I'm also going to have another drive just as a data storage drive. How would I partition the raid 0 drives to get ready for the dual boot setup? Should I partition half and half for both XP and Vista? I guess that probably depends on what i'm installing on each OS. Since Vista will be my primary OS I'll probably have more installed on that partition than XP. Just wondering if there would be any performance benefits with a small/bigger partition on each OS.

Is their any performance concerns on a dual boot setup? Any else running something similar and have any tips? Thanks.

No performance concerns worth noting on a dual boot setup. Most of the arguments for it hindering performance are faulty. What's your primary raid partition for? Is it just os and applications, or do you store any data on there? That will dictate the need for size and application of partitions. If you're going to use vista more often, I'd allot more space to its drive. Something like 220GB-Vista 100GB-XP I'm sure would suffice.

As far as setting up the dualboot, this is where I point every one:

www.apcmag.com/dualboot

A couple of my friends helped write that article and it's excellent. It will teach you how to dual boot any types of operating software easily and effectively.

Primary partition will probably be Vista with DX10 games and some applications and just everyday stuff. Second partition I want XP with DX9 or any older type game and benchmarking software. Then I'm must gonna have a seperate storage drive where i'll put any important data on. I probably don't even need that big of drives for the dual boot setup... maybe a couple 1xxGB drives for the raid 0 setup with something like 60%/40% or 75%/25% Vista/XP partition size and one larger hard drive for the data. Thoughts?

So theres no extra step for a dual boot raid 0 setup or anything worth noting?

Thanks.

I've seen alot of people post to do this the opposite way, but this is how I've always done it.

1. Install Vista.
2. Install XP - upon installing XP, mbr gets overwritten and you cant get into vista anymore. Boot Vista cd, at first prompt choose your language, and click Repair in the bottom left of the next screen. Believe the next window should have a Startup Repair option. It will fix mbr and let you boot vista.
3. Once back in vista, download EasyBCD
4. Use EasyBCD to add XP in the bootloader then restart and your done.