that did nothing at all

Ok, you could always get another partitioning tool if fdisk is too advanced. You can download bootitng, a partitioning program that allows you to resize, delete, move, or any other thing you can do to partitions. The trial is free, and you can even resize ntfs safely using it. It all fits into a floppy disk, and you can boot of the floppy disk

and i use windows currently....infact, as we speak, im burning the 4th iso disc for fedora core 3.

Use a distro with a good disk partitioning tool. Mandrake's is particularly good, so is Fedora's. All distros come with partitioning tools as part of the install. You create the partitions and set the size and filesystem during the installation. Just make sure you choose the 'custom' or 'advanced' option when you get to the partitioning stage of the install. Use ext3 for the linux / partition. The swap partition (which should be 2x RAM up to a limit of 512MB) is formatted as 'linux swap' - you don't have an option about that. Your plan is sound, IMHO.