How to dual boot

[Bone]

How to a dual boot if I have windows vista premium, I want to put windows xp on my machine for gaming.

[Thrax]

Format PC, install XP on primary partition, install Vista. If Dell gives you an image-based recovery, you're SOL, because installing XP after vista is a nightmare.

[Bone]

I highly doubt dell is going to give me a actual vista disk, is there a way to get them too though?

and I cant just make a separate partion and install xp on it even if i still have vista installed?

[Thrax]

XP will overwrite the Vista boot partition, and the only way to fix that is to have a Vista disc that you perform a repair install with.