Hi, again, Steve.
I have to concede that I'm battling to find anything that doesn't make the simple task of dual-booting a modern Linux distro and WXP look really complex. Perhaps using pure Google rather than StartPage might help.
A couple you might find useful:
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/dual-boot-windows-7-ubuntu.html
goes into a fair amount of detail. Slightly odd - he's using an elderly version of Ubuntu, but never mind - gives a good idea of its partitioner, and of the GParted alternative.
Vista (= W7 for our purposes) doesn't always take kindly to having its partition shrunk. In the past I've used a Vista DVD to repair the boot system - the tutorial shows another approach, which looks better to me.
XP is less cantankerous. I said last night that you should defrag it within an inch of its life, and promptly found a guide which said defragging didn't help - but that a full disk check should be carried out. I tend to assume that one would carry out a chkdsk prior to defragging, and would tend to do both. (The only problem I've had so far with XP/Linux happened when I didn't bother defragging XP. Now watch all my attempts from here on go pear-shaped.)
Remember that you can run useful apps like the GParted partitioner directly from the live Linux CD/DVD.
My own sequence when I dual boot XP on one of my eBay relics with a Linux distro:
Chkdsk (OK, OK, sorry I said nothing about this earlier) and thoroughly defragment WXP.
Fire up the Linux live CD. (Or DVD - most of them are too big to fit on CDs now. You know what I mean.)
Launch GParted from the live CD. Following Igor's instructions in the above link, shrink the WXP partition until you have whatever space you want to use for Linux. I tend to do partitions one at a time; never tried Igor's trick of setting up all the new partitions in advance then telling GParted to do its thing. As you prefer.
In the "unallocated" space which GParted then shows on your drive (everything to the right of the shrunken Windows partition), create the partitions you want for Linux. Windows needs a primary partition to boot from; Linux will boot from just about anything. (Google for more info if required.) One hard drive can only hold four primary partitions. Having shrunk the Windows partition/s (W7 etc waste partitions horribly with the system partition, etc etc, all labelled primary by default), I make the whole of the rest of the drive an "extended" partition. This counts as one primary partition.
Within the extended partition, I set up my Linux system's partitions. I like to have a / (root) partition for the system files, a /home partition for my user stuff, and a swap partition.
This is unnecessarily fiddly most of the time, though, and you can leave out the /home partition. Just create a / partition (nah, I've no idea why they use "/") and a swap partition. Saves you trying to guess how much space the system will need.
Linux uses swap much as Windows uses the page file. It also uses it for hibernation, so if you plan to hibernate, it should be at least as big as your RAM - plus a few MB for luck.
An example.
Let's say you have a 250 GB hard drive. GParted will read this as about 232 GiB. Chkdsk and defrag. Shrink the Windows partition. If in doubt, just give it about half the drive - worth doing a little thinking about this, as resizing partitions once everything's installed can take an age
Let's say, then - shrink your Windows NTFS partition to about 116 GiB. (If your Acer has a "hidden" recovery partition and you've not burned recovery disks, leave it alone - another primary partition wasted *sigh*).
You've 2GB of RAM, so you want to leave 2GB for the swap partition. to the right of your newly shrunk Windows partition, create a 114 GiB (or whatever will leave a shade over 2GB/your RAM free) ext 4 partition - you choose this from GParted's menus; self explanatory. During installation, you'll mark this as / - I'm assuming you won't bother with separate / and /home partitions (quite wasteful on a small hard drive.)
In the remaining space, create your swap partition.
Now follow Igor's instructions to install Ubuntu/Mint/whatever - the setpup he shows is typical enought for you to be able to work out any little variations.
When you get to the partitioning choices, select "something else" or "manually allocate space" or whatever the partioner offers rather than simply choosing the default "install alongside Windows" or whatever it is, assuming you want to control the partitioning process yourself. (More on this later.)
Whilst you don't need to tell it to partition your / and swap partitions, you DO need to mark these partitions as / and as swap during the installer's partioning step. Simply click on the partition concerned to highlight it, click "edit" (actually, I think the current ones say "change" - easy to work out the details), tell it to use the partition concerned as ext4 or swap as appropriate using the drop down menus, detail the mount point (ie mark the ext4 partition / and the swap partition as, er, swap), and press on with the installation.
There's another tutorial here, if you can bear it:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot
With respect to the automatic partitioning choice - "Install them side by side" or whatever it is - I have to say I've not tried this. I've seen a number of comments advising against it, but with no really compelling reasons. If you have all your Windows reinstallation stuff, you might give it a try and let us know how it goes (it should give you the option to decide how much space to allow each installation - Windows and Linux.)
Sorry, Steve, it always ends up looking really complicated, when it isn't, really. Bit like riding a bicycle - easier to do than to describe, as long as one is willing to accept a few mishaps in the early stages.
If I find any clearer guides, I'll link to them. Getting towards my bed time now, though...
