I'm currently putting the final touches on my new computer and though I was on the fence of going all out Vista i decided to do a dual boot between XP and Vista to be on the safe side (in case one thing doesnt work on Vista i can always use XP). The two OS's will go on a 150GB Raptor Drive. My initial plan was to place XP on the C: drive and dedicate 15GB to it, Vista on a newly partitioned V: drive and dedicate 15GB to it and create a G: drive for the remaining 120GB for programs. I thought this was fine till I read on a site that recommended doing 30GB for Vista because "Microsoft recommend that to take advantage of the 'Premium' features your PC should have around 15GB of free space following the install'. Is this true? I thought 15GB of total space for Vista Ultimate was enough but am i wrong? How much space should i allocate to Vista to give it enough breathing room and not limit space on my drive for programs? 20GB? 30GB? Thx in advance.

I'd like to hear someone's opinion on this as well. I'm thinking about partitioning my new drive. I've never really done it before except when I split my external drive between FAT32 and NTFS so I could use it on my old Mac.

I'm looking at the space on my hard drive right now...and to me it looks like you should be able to easily run Vista with 20GB. The problem is that obviously, you wont be able to install anything No doubt you realize that so I will just report, yes, it looks like 20GB is ample

On my PC:
Vista: 192GB
XP: 87GB

Thanks for the reply. So basically i decided to dedicate 30GB for Vista, 15GB for the install and 15GB left for whatever crap gets installed post-install. As for programs i will not install them on the partition that has the Vista because of course i will run out of space. Instead programs, games and such will go on the remaining space HDD. So basically my set up will look like this.

HDD:
150GB Raptor

Partition Layout:
C: Drive: 15GB space for XP
V: Drive: 30GB space for Vista
G: Drive: 100GB space for programs, games, files, etc...

Basically XP will run out of the C: drive, Vista from the V: drive and any programs i install on the system will go into the G: drive. Is this practical? Anyone see any issues that may come up? I have done this before on my old system but never on a dual boot set up.