good free solution 4 simultaneous tripleboot of xp, 7, ubuntu?

[pianoplayer88key]

ok first by free I don't mean get those OS's for free - I have them all legally - xp home was purchased, 7 beta downloaded, ubuntu is free anyway. by free i mean I don't have to purchase ($0.005 or more) software or hardware to do it..

basically i have all 3 OS's installed on my machine, but I have to shut down one before I go into another. I'd like to be able to run all 3 concurrently, without sacrificing performance (relative to just booting it by itself normally) in whichever one i happen to have "active".

Is there any way to do this? My bro mentioned vmware (player) but said the other day it sucks for gaming.
Since I only have 2GB physical RAM, often exceed that in XP (thanks to having 100s or 1000s of tabs open in firefox routinely - once recently my swap file was increased to like 5GB), is there some way I could like hibernate one OS (save everything in RAM & swap to a designated portion of the hard drive), then load another (from hibernation) without having to reset / POST / autoexec.bat (or other equivalents - ok so maybe i'm showing my age (i was born the same year the original IBM PC came out and remember our first ms-dos computer bought in 1988) etc? I wouldn't expect it to be as fast as switching users in xp, although that'd be nice

There are a ton of articles about multibooting linux and windows products. There are several commercial boot managers available too. Duplicating a drive with multiple os'es can get real complicated at times. As for osx there are some legal issues if you are not using an apple pc.

If you have more than one drive you could install each os on each drive. That is you must get the bios to boot to that drive during installation. Once all the os's are installed, You just have to go to bios to boot the drive and os of choice.

I personally use virtual machines to avoid the whole multiboot thing. Vmware, Virtual box, and qemu are the major players in that area. There my be others that I am not aware of.qemu will even run on a ppc mac running linux.
on some of my older machines, i do have multiple drives and different os'es and I do the cable unplug-plug (while the machine is off) routine.

[pianoplayer88key]

I already have the three OS's installed - all to the same physical hard drive (an 80gb), separate partitions (Windows XP Home, Windows 7 Ultimate Beta, Ubuntu 7.1 (or thereabouts)).
The other two drives I have, a 250gb and 750gb, are for larger programs and for data. (I don't currently have OS X, but would someday like to try it out. Not in the immediate / near future plan though (read: probably not this year, maybe not next.))

I have GRUB which'll enable me to choose whether to go to Windows or Linux. Thing is I have to completely shut down one OS to start another, and that's what I want to avoid.

So how well would the virtual machines work? Would I be able to get the same performance and functionality as if I had just booted the OS the normal way?

As long as you have an interpreter to host an os, the performance will never be prefect. I have heard that some people say that vmware probably does the best job. Since you have so many os's, I would wonder what would be perfect for you. Having more than one os on a machine is a waste of space unless you are some kind of developer. Dual boot machines can be a pain if you ever want to duplicate the machine. At my old job, I had to take care of labs of dual boot machines till everything was moved to virtual. I like to use several os's but the applicaton software is so similar now on all platforms, I see no need use/waste my hard disk for multiple os's especially one as bloated as windows. I can run dsl linux on a 1g drive or less and do most of the things I do.

[pianoplayer88key]

Main thing is I want to be able to switch from one OS to the other without needing to close open programs & shut one OS down, and hard-reboot the computer and go through POST / etc.

There are quite a few things I do that need Windows, like some games, steam platform being an example. Also afaik my external hardware devices, like mp3 player, camera, etc, interface best with W.
I'm also wanting to try out linux, and I have Ubuntu 7 installed. I know 8's out, and I have a live CD version of 8... should I install 8 on top of 7, or what?
I also downloaded the Windows 7 beta to give it a try and see how I like it. I avoided Vista like the plague, but I want to see if 7's enough of an improvement to warrant my purchase consideration when it's commercially available.

Since I don't want to have to shut down programs & OS's and restart / POST my computer, is there some way I could switch from one to the other, and still maintain full performance as if I was only running that one OS? One idea I had was basically hibernate the OS I'm switching out of, suspending all operations (and writing RAM to hard disk) then loading the OS I'm switching TO out of hibernation. Is that possible?

[tokenuser]

Originally Posted by pianoplayer88key

Main thing is I want to be able to switch from one OS to the other without needing to close open programs & shut one OS down, and hard-reboot the computer and go through POST / etc.

There are quite a few things I do that need Windows, like some games, steam platform being an example. Also afaik my external hardware devices, like mp3 player, camera, etc, interface best with W.
I'm also wanting to try out linux, and I have Ubuntu 7 installed. I know 8's out, and I have a live CD version of 8... should I install 8 on top of 7, or what?
I also downloaded the Windows 7 beta to give it a try and see how I like it. I avoided Vista like the plague, but I want to see if 7's enough of an improvement to warrant my purchase consideration when it's commercially available.

Since I don't want to have to shut down programs & OS's and restart / POST my computer, is there some way I could switch from one to the other, and still maintain full performance as if I was only running that one OS? One idea I had was basically hibernate the OS I'm switching out of, suspending all operations (and writing RAM to hard disk) then loading the OS I'm switching TO out of hibernation. Is that possible?

The closest you'll get to what you describe is VMWare being run from XP (W7 might be a little unstable to host a virtual machine, but should run OK in one - VMWare hooks the underlying OS). But with 2GB of RAM you'll be hard pressed to get any great performance out of it.