Thanks Gerry.

I've ordered a 500 GB USB external drive to back up all my files, plus ordered win7 64bit.

Good call on the VM. I have heard about running VMs but need to read up about them. Therefore I think I will go with the dual boot initially (option 4), and then see first hand if the programmes I like to use will run on 64 bit on the new partition. Some of them are big with lots of modules, a lot of which I don't use so who knows. If they do run then I can phase out the old partition (32bit) so everything is 64 bit. If they don't I'm still able to run everything I need and can go with the VM. This will keep me running without risk of too much downtime.

Thanks for the info, and thanks for the Mach3 post confirmation. I'd read somewhere it did not have a post, then just recently seen that it did.