To fdisk or not to fdisk

I have been thinking of wiping my laptop and starting with a clean build (maybe even adding some ram and throwing on the windows 7 Beta).
The problem is I don't want to lose my good old XP backup. I also have a few programs for school loaded on there. Most of them have been migrated over to my main rig (matlab and labview) but the one I am using alot right now, mathcad 13, does not work on Vista. Sure I could get mathcad 14, which does work in Vista, but it costs $130 for the student license and I will only conceivably be using it for another few months.
My mind is telling me no, but my body.. my body... err, nevermind.

In other thoughts my research lab is shutting down at school. While this doesn't immediately put me out of a job, it does make things around the office a little tense. We are on contract to finish a few projects, so they are keeping me on until the end of the semester, but the gravy train is over. No more charging hours to develop things for the lab (like new fixtures for my antennas or reading research paper). Its all about finishing the material testing and no more double dipping my senior design projects with lab projects (and thus getting paid to do my homework).
Oh well, things could be worse.