Thanks for all the info. I would probably stick to Disk Manager or Partition Magic for the HD partitioning. All formatting would be in NTFS format, not FAT32 -- so at least there's that.   :-)   I do (rarely) set a restore point manually but fortunately have only had to revert once. (An uninstall didn't go too well.)

I do want to get better acquainted with Linux. Maybe I'll install it on the old machine.

Do you have any experience with Virtual PC?