CD for the partition software?
ive never even heard of that program prior to you telling me so sorry i cant give you any more info. check the website im sure theyll have documentation on how to set it up and go about actually doing it.
if your talking about the resizing details, then i do afew a little input.
since you only have one hard drive and only one partition, it should be easy on selecting the partition to resize... obviously the only (NTFS) partition in the system. you said right now its about 18gb.. i dont know what software you will be planning on installing on the NTFS partition, or files youll be downloading, in the future, but, id resize it to maybe, like you said, around 7-10gb.
im not sure how many GB the default ubuntu install is, please look into it and check. i would think 8GB would be more than enough though. so i would resize the NTFS drive down to about 10gb (this is personal preference, so..)
how much RAM do you have? in linux you can create 'swap' files.. which is basically the ability for linux to use a partition on your harddrive as RAM. when your computer is running and is using 100% of RAM, it will then start to use that 'swap' partition as 'RAM', although much slower. if you have less than 512mb then consider the fact that you may want to use 512mb-1GB for a 'swap' partition when installing ubuntu. if this is the case, resize your windows partition to 9gb, leaving about 1gb for swap and the remaining 8GB or so for your ubuntu install.
after resizing your NTFS partition go ahead and startup the install. try and figure it out yourself, you wont hurt anything!
just remember this: /dev/hda1. this may seem odd but youll become familiar with its meaning. its basically the file that linux will use as your NTFS partition. during the ubuntu install, be sure not to touch this 'device' file when specifying where to install ubuntu.
where youll want to install it most likely will be '/dev/hda2' (ie, the '2'nd partition on your first ('a') hard drive). id imagine ubuntu will do a good job at autodetecting this, and will walk you through the process of creating the linux (reiserfs or ext3) partition and formatting it.
now that i think of it, just skip the swap part when the installer asks (if it does)... unless you really want it and have looked into it.
good luck
