All great advice. I am not going to add any advice. I chimed in because
of what some / most computer manufacturers were doing a couple of years ago.

On many of the machines I installed Ubuntu on, the hard drive was
already set-up with 4 primary partitions. One for the manufacturers
tools. a second for the windows backup image(the one you wanted to copy
to CDs so you could re-install windows. One for the windows partition.
Can't remember what the other one was used for. When installing Linux I
would have to delete the tools partition (most of the time available
online). I then needed an extended partition that I could install any
number of Distributions within. If desired I could put a home partition
in there too.