lil new at this-

i've read about dual booting xp and vista, is this the better option for xp/vista?

my original thought was to give myself the option when booting to boot one or the other.

does two hard drives make this easier? (one OS per drive) or perhaps having both OSs on one drive and the other for storage?
does that even make sense?

thanks

partition your hard drive in control panel-administrative tools-computer management-disk management and place one operating system in each partition then select your os to run in the boot menu

Using two hard drives is better than using one and partitioning it. If your OS drive ever failed, you'd be losing both OSes instead of just one. Also, if your BIOS supports boot device selection via a key press... you can load one drive with Vista, then one with XP and use the BIOS boot menu instead of relying on Vista's bootloader.

Exactly. Much more sense than a one drive partition/dual boot IMO.

Not that most people need to keep an XP install at this time since Vista is working fine. But if you like to run older games and apps then you might be glad you have XP still.

one more thing to help.
If you do only use one drive install XP first and save yourself some quality learning time.
Its easy this way and not so easy with Vista first.

Agree with Zoron