OS - Acer Aspire 4740

It's been quite a while since I've done this, and I think it is fairly well automated by now. In general, you create a new partition on your hard drive (assuming there is room). A normal installation of Windows, iirc, typically uses the entire hard drive, so you need to move / shrink the programs on the Windows partition such that there is space to create a new partition.

(Aside: One partition on the order of 8-10 GB will get you by in Linux--there are distros that use much less. Further, Linux afficionados (like myself) often like to install many partitions, with each partition being used for certain functions / portions of the OS, including applications, user data, etc. I think you can learn about that later.)

After you've created at least one partition, you install Linux on that partition.

Nowadays, I'm guessing that most Linux distros will do most of the above automatically--even before you create the new partition, insert the install disk in your CD/DVD drive and boot from the CD.

Then read what it tells you--there could be pitfalls, so don't follow through on the procedure--just read the first time. A really badly behaving distro might offer to wipe out your Windows installation, but you don't want that.

After reading the instructions (and maybe proceeding just a little, until it tells you it is going to make changes to your disk), if you have any questions come back here and ask them. Or, look for a local LUG (Linux Users Group), attend a meeting, and seek some help there.

Here is what I did on my old laptop: 1. Downloaded the free Ubuntu live CD. Burn the image to CD. 2. Loaded it in CD drive and started the laptop. 3. Once booting up, I selected the CD to boot. 4. Select try it first and see if it will work on my laptop. 5. When I was satisfied with performance, I clicked install Ubuntu. 6. Followed instructions on screen. 7. Note, choose to "operate it side by side with windows". It detected if windows is installed and give me that option. 8. Enjoy Ubuntu as I am. Hope this will help. My laptop: Pentium 4, 2.4 Ghz, 40 GB HDD, 512 MB RAM

You may want to consider doing the install on a flash drive

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

which will be fine & help you learn all the details of running linux

I just installed Ubuntu on my desktop when I upgraded to win 7, and it is in a 30gb partition. Since I was formating my hd at the time it was easy to set up the partition. My son has Ubuntu on a memory stick. Both work fine.

If Ubuntu is the Linux distro you are interested in, visit https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GraphicalInstall

If you are interested in Fedora or SUSE or any of the myriad other distributions of Linux that are available, most distributions have similar instruction sets available on their web sites.