La Machine Est Morte, Vive La Machine!

[Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxx]

Advice needed -- bear with me while I expatiate.
My XP machine -- a Dell Dimension 8400 Pentium 4 with 1GB of RAM and a
160GB hard drive -- gave up the ghost last week, two months short of its
10th birthday. It served me well, and XyWrite ran beautifully on it. But
now that Win XP is also moribund, I could no longer avoid the
long-dreaded decision about how to run XyWrite under the new regime.
Since we recently moved from XP to 32-bit Win 7 Pro at work, this seemed
like the way to go to ensure compatibility between my home and work
setups (and to avoid, at least initially, the headache of setting up a
virtual 32-bit environment). The question is, how best to implement it?
My new machine is on the way. It's an HP Envy 700xt (4th Gen Intel Core
i7-4790 processor quad-core [3.6GHz, 8MB shared cache]) with 8GB RAM and
a 2TB SATA hard drive. It comes with Windows 7 Home Premium 64
installed, but I've also bought licensed copies of Win 7 Pro, both 64-
and 32-bit. I'm thinking of setting up a multiboot system with, say,
three partitions: Win 7-64 in one; Win 7-32 in another; and, who knows,
maybe one of the Linux distros in the third. My basic question is, how
best to do this?
I'm thinking along the following lines: First, install Win 7 Pro-64 over
Home Premium in the existing partition. Then create the two new
partitions, and install Win 7 Pro-32 in the second. (Let's leave what to
do with the third partition until later.) My first question is, should I
use Windows to create the multiboot system, or is there an external
partitioning utility that's preferable?
Second, I'm crestfallen over the prospect of not being able to run Xy4
full-screen. I've become somewhat used to running it in a window at work
-- I have no choice, as I lack the network privileges to do otherwise.
But at home I'm wondering whether I should downgrade the video drivers
to enable DOS full-screen in my Win 7-32 partition. Anyone here tried
this? What are the pros and cons?
Once I get XyWrite running satisfactorily in the 32-bit partition, I'll
probably play around with virtual 32-bit environments in the 64-bit
partition. When I do I'll no doubt have further questions, even after I
reread the volumes you all have written on the subject in this space. It
was all academic for me then, so a lot went in one ear and out the
other. But I'll be all ears now.

Liberté, égalité, full screen -- ou la mort!

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx