External Hard Drive to be used with windows and Mac

I shall paint the picture;
I have a very nice mobile hard drive on it's way to me, and I shall be upgrading to leopard at some point soon after receiving it, my MBP has a 120gb internal HDD and the external on it's way is 160gb .
I will be using it as a time machine HD , but will also be using it to transfer from my mac to college/university PCs.
So, do any of ya'l out there know a good way of going about it? My thoughts are along the lines of creating a separate windows/mac partition because Time Machine I assume uses HFS+ and as far as I am aware, windows is unable to use this.
I am not 100% sure on this so any help or corrections or indeed alternate solutions are welcome.
Only requirements are that it's with my MBP and G-Tech G-Drive mini only, no extra bits and bobs.
Thank you in advance

A 160 GB drive may be a bit small to use to back up a 120GB drive with TimeMachine... and have a separate partition to use for Windows files. While your MacBook Pro's 120GB drive may not be close to full yet... it will likely continue to grow in time. TimeMachine keeps multiple copies of files that you change allowing you to go "back in time" to various points. It will use as much space as is available on the drive. You may want to keep a larger external desktop drive for your TimeMachine backup... or dedicate your entire 160GB to it.

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