Fellas, a note About VMWare:
VMWare is a powerful tool, but virtualizing multiple machines from a home PC is undoubtedly beyond most personal computer's abilities. A personal computer can probably run two VMWare machines if it's a powerful computer, my laptop runs one Virtual just fine. VMWare is really intended for multiple instance operation on server (in which case one server can become ten) systems, however, this isn't really something you could achieve on a home or personal computer.
If you have a new OS you'd like to test out, I would absolutely suggest getting a VMWare distribution of it first, as this is an easy way to see if you actually want to install the OS.

Parallel is a decent option, but running four different OS's is still going to be taxing on system resources, regardless of how its being done, on top of that If I were going to run multiple OS's I'd rather have them installed directly to my computer's hardware on a clean system (or fresh system at least) rather than try to integrate each one successively on top of the others. At least this way I'd be able to troubleshoot the installations more effectively if I had to.




Get partition magic, its cheap and/or you can probably find it free online. Google a partitioning tutorial using whatever phraseology you want, though I'd recommend at least browsing the Microsoft support library for some info. I have had some issues with Partition Magic not holding partitions as well as other programs, however I would suggest that it's a common, well supported and well documented option, especially if you are concerned that you will need help troubleshooting your installation.

As far as Linux goes, I would suggest Ubuntu or OpenSUSE, I would suggest Enterprise/Not-Free SUSE over Enterprise Ubuntu if you are going to actually pay for software though, some really neat usability features are included in the paid versions of Linux, makes it much more of a viable personal OS.

Regards,
the Doc.