XP Pro and Win 8 Pro dual boot dilemna

At this time, April 2013, I expected to build a dual boot desktop system with Win 8 for current and future capabilities and Win XP for continued use of favorite legacy aps that will not run on Win8. Turns out that disk formats are a problem. The 64-bit Win8 needs a GPT format partition to install and 32-bit XP or XP Pro needs an MBR format partition to install. Neither OS will share the same format and a main disk can only be formatted and partitioned in one type format or the other. What to do??!! Two computers are not an acceptable answer; I want one 'box'. Also, not interested in XP Mode embeded in Win8 or 'virtual machine'. One suggestion has been to run the OS's on separate disks. To me, that means 2 SSD's to get a performance boost on both OS's. Also, to change from one OS to the other, one must reboot; catch the enter-bios-key; change the boot order; save/exit; and reboot. (Clumsy!). Then what to do with data and docs - an NAS files storage (e.g., WD Live 'cloud' drive)? Is there any good news to be had? Are there any recent ease-of-use solutions to help resolve the dual boot dilemna? Will a boot manager really help and is there a good 'freebie' boot manager out there? Thoughts, anyone?
 
I have ten GB of apps on my one machine and none of them are games but have found none that do not boot to Windows 7. So you must have some really old applications that predated XP or support died on shortly after its inception.

There are several free boot managers. Just search Boot managers in Wikipedia and they have a really nice chart of them.

Changing the BIOS settings to boot another disk? I never heard of that one since that is what a boot manager is good at doing for you without having to change BIOS settings. I Quad boot on more than one disk. Instead of a pricey SSD why not try a Sata3 7200 rpm disk. I see noticeable performance on a faster spinning disk. Mine are SATA2's but a faster IO should also show faster performance along with proper formatting.
 
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