Vista is a doddle to partition. You may not be able to manipulate recover partitions just as you wish, but the rest goes really well with the OS's program.
I'm on 7 right now, and created partitions in a similar manner to Vista.
Say, 100, for the OS. 60 or whatever for Program files and the rest for data.
Admin tools - Computer management - Storage - Disk management. Creating and shoving the partitions about is, for once, fairly logical.