External drive for both Mac & Windows

I'd like to be able to do the smart thing and have a backup of the drives on my iMac. I've got Windows installed thru Boot Camp, which I access using VMware Fusion.
When I visited an Apple Store, one of the guys there told me that I could get an external hard drive, format it for each drive, and Time Machine would back it up. Having no idea how to do this, I thought I'd check here.
First of all, I'm not sure whether to get a 500GB or 1TB external HD--I have a 500GB HD on my iMac, but I'm only using roughly 100GB of it, and I have no plans to use much more than 150GB. Do I need a huge drive?
Once I have the HD, how do I format it for Mac & Windows XP separately? I know I have to partition it, but after that....what?
Next, is it possible to use Time Machine for both drives? Or will I only be able to use it for the Mac drive and manually backup XP?
After reading some other posts, I'm wondering if it's wise to update to 10.5.5. Any advice on this?
Any help/suggestions would be great--thanks!

TM will not backup a Windows partition. If you create a disk image drive with VM Fusion TM will back it up, but only the entire image file.
If you partition an external drive using GUID, then you can format one of the partitions FAT32 to use with Windows, but TM will not backup that partition nor backup anything on your main drive to that partition.
A TM backup drive or partition should be at least twice the capacity of the capacity of the drive you are backing up. If your iMac drive is 500 GBs then your backup drive's capacity should be roughly twice that size (less the space you have allocated as the Boot Camp partition.)
There's no reason not to update to 10.5.5, but if you prefer not to that's your choice. It isn't necessary although if you are going to use TM it would be wise to update because several TM bugs have been fixed by the 10.5.5 update.

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