Ron,
To be honest, it wouldn't be worth having a multi-boot configuration for a typical computer user. I have a feeling that you want to have Windows 98SE again.
You can find old "outdated" machines cheap and if you still have the 98SE disk, just install it on the old system. Granted, an old system now a days is a PIII 750 or even into the 1.xx MHz. If you think about it, having that type of system with W98SE is great compaired to what the OS was typically installed on back in 99-01.
As in all new OS's that Microsoft comes out with, give the Vista another 1-2 years from release before they get "most" of the bugs out. That leads into another topic of hardware requirements...
Here they are for Windows Vista...
- 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
- 1 GB of system memory.
- A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero2.
- 128 MB of graphics memory.
- 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
- DVD-ROM Drive3.
We were playing around with Vista at my tech school and found that 1GB of memory was still "doggy".
Joe