Personally, I haven’t done much dual booting. Infact, the last time I did, I think it was Win 3.11 and OS/2 Warp… may have been Win95 and OS/2. Not sure, but I think the loader came with OS/2.
I’ve actually never used LILO, so I can’t tell you how good it is for 3 OS’s. I do know that a few Mandrake releases come with Boot Magic (same company as Partition Magic, I think it’s Quarterdeck, but not sure). If you can find one of those, it’s probably $30-50, which would be cheaper than the other loader mentioned, and you’d get any other addys that come with the distro (the one I got had 4 e-books in PDF, I think Linux in 24hrs and GIMP in 24hrs from Sams, RH6.0 Unleashed from Que I think, and another one or two).
I did a little looking on the web, I guess LILO will boot as many different OS’s as you want. Here is a setup from a guy running 4 OS’s, Linux, Win95, Minix (hehe, got that on disk with a textbook), and FreeBSD.
More reading, Boot Magic has been discontinued as a stand alone product, and is now included in Partition Magic 8. Win 2k and Win 95 are both supported, but not Linux. Of course, that’s just for tech support help, it is designed to work with Linux, as well as work with Linux Ext3 partiotions. Listed at $70USD, though you still may be able to find retail Linux distros with Boot Magic or even Partition and Boot Magic bundled in.
As Hexa-db mentioned, I took a glance at System Commander. They claim support of any PC OS. Of course, any should work, I would imagine this means you get tech support for setting it up with any OS, but I would ask. It does come with a partition manager as well, and with the same approximate cost ($70USD physical, 10 bucks less for download only), it seems about neck-and-neck with the Partition Magic 8 package.
The only big advangage of Partition Magic I can see off hand is what looks to be a powerful backup utility… it includes their DataKeeper product. While I couldn’t find any in-depth information, they do say it can monitor your file activity in the background and automatically backup files, including multiple versions of the same file. I would imagine the backups are saved to a backup partition or spare HDD, but they may support devices like tape and zip drives. Also, it doesn’t say, but it likely only supports Win OS’s (as in works with, not tech support).
My best advice though, see if you can do it with LILO. Then if you like some of the more advanced features of one of these other two, get 'em. But one other thing, I’d suggest going to WinXP if your computer is up to the specs. I’ve used every Windows from 3.1 to XP except NT (but including 2k), and XP is by far better than any of the others. More stable, and better looking, and I haven’t found a single app yet that runs under Win95 and not WinXP, though I have had to set “Compatability Mode” on one or two. To do this, go to the .exe in question, left-click and select properties. Switch to the “Compatability” tab, and you have a few options. One, you can set it to attempt to emulate previous windows versions (options are Win95, Win98/ME, Win2k, and WinNT). You can also disable the visual themes, in case an older program doesn’t like the new look and feel (I don’t use this, however, because I use WindowBlinds from StarDock, and I can do it there, too.).
Hope this all helps,
Imp
(or $60 US to be precise)