What's The Worst That Could Happen?

Installing Linux involves changes to your computer's hard drive, perhaps even repartitioning of the hard drive to create the room to install the Linux OS. How you create this space depends upon how your system's hard drive is setup. If you happen to have unpartitioned space on your drive, (not likely with a newer, bought-from-the-store system) you can partition and format this space for Linux. If your drive is just one big partition you will have to resize a current partition. This involves making changes to your system that could make the hard drive, and everything on it, no longer accessible, requiring a complete reinstall of your current operating system. Backing up your hard drive, or at the least whatever information and programs you would not want to lose is strongly recommended. If you determine this to be the case with your system, I recommend that you buy one of the boxed Linux distributions that includes instructions and software specifically written to handle this. If this hasn't scared you away, and it shouldn't have, you're ready to boot the installation program.