>>>It would be worthwhile confirming that any software you plan to buy can reduce partition sizes as you describe. If you go that route I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences.
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>>I posted a message on the board of Acronis product support. Hopefully someone will reply. The good thing is that I will be doing this on a new notebook. And if the repartitioning does not work I can use their system disk to restore the drive to the factory condition.
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>I'd also ask for advice about your specific situation. You may find, for example, that if you boot up the new notebook and activate Vista, the disk size/volume label and/or other disk parameters may be used in the activation/copy protection mechanism. If you then change the partition size/label etc. Vista may complain that it's not registered/activated.
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>You may be better off resizing partitions before booting Vista up at all. I'd ask on the Acronis site about this.

I found a link on the web that gives step-by-step on how to create a dual-boot from Vista-installed only PC. So maybe I will try their steps. One thing is not clear if their steps apply to Vista 64 or only Vista 32 (the article was published in 2007). But I didn't know that maybe Vista has a built-in ability to create a multi-boot system.