setting up my new rig

My new rig start coming together with only couple more components on the way; it should be up and running before Christmas. I just ordered Vista Home Premium 32bit and i have 2 hard disks (one IDE and one Sata drive).

1) I'm thinking of keeping Winxp one the IDE and Vista on Sata so i can dual boot. Should i install Winxp first or the Vista?

2) And i red from somewhere there's problem when installing Winxp with sata optical drive as winxp has no driver for it (unrcognizable?), is this true?

XP first, then Vista so you're certain the bootloader works for both. Not sure if the XP NT bootloader has problems with Vista, but it sure doesn't find Linux installations.

I have installed XP Pro multiple times on SATA disks and never encountered problems, but my brother needs a floppy with SATA drivers for his. I think it depends on the mother board, either that or I just have an updated version of XP.

(1) I wouldn't bother, unless you're doing something extremely nerdy (in which case you probably shouldn't be asking for advice here, heh).

That is, pick one or the other and stick with it -- otherwise you'll just be stuck maintaining two systems, which is a pretty serious headache. Things like downloading and installing all updates twice, installing all the programs you're using twice, rebooting every time you want to switch, and so on.

Currently there's not a whole lot that XP can run and Vista can't, or vice versa, so unless you're in the extremely unlikely position of having two of these rare birds and wanting to run both, you don't need that headache.

FWIW, I've been using Vista x64 pretty much since it came out, and have had no "showstopper" issues. Even classics like Fallout and Planescape: Torment run just fine.

(2) Very likely. IOW, if you want to run XP, just buy an IDE optical drive.

If you have an old motherboard then it is possible XP will not install without using a floppy disk for the driver. Motherboards around when SATA first came out only operated via SATA raid controllers. These days motherboards normally have a switch in bios where you can switch the SATA between IDE(default: IDE emulation or something like that I guess) and RAID mode.