I need some help with Slackware 10.1...I have been using Mandrake 10 dual booted with Windows XP on my machine, but Mandrake is acting up on my and freezes all the time, I've gotten sick of it and haven't used Linux for about a month now because it was infuriating me so bad.

Well now I have decided I want to switch to Slackware 10.1 because thats the distro my teacher in my networking/IT class uses, and it has alot more apps pre installed than mandrake 10. I downloaded the ISOs, burned em, popped in the first disc, and I knew I was in trouble when the first thing that came up was a command line wanting to know what to do next after a page of text. What do I type to continue, and how do I do it securely knowing I wont write over or wipe out my my 2 windows partitions? I have about 10-15 Gbs for my Mandrake partition, so how do I make sure it ONLY installs there?

anything will help in advance...Thanks.

Aren't there directions in there? I remember I installed it without reading the documentation. First you have to run a program in which you can choose your hard disk partition, the packages you want to have. Then when you're finished you type something else and it will install.

yep, checked the docs and if you have everything right you can just run "setup"
http://slackware.com/install/setup.php

It's not that hard and if you're still a bit new (to the command line) you better read some in the documentation.

If you didn't get rid of your Mandrake partition, just install Slack over it. You shouldn't need to run cfdisk if you still have that partition, so just run "setup", activate your swap partition, and them format your / partition with ext3 or reiserfs and you're good to go. If you're not sure what the numbers for your Windows and Mandrake partition are ex. /hda3, then running cfdisk will show you your partion table. Write them down, exit, and run setup again. If you're new, I recommend running the full install. And don't be surprised when Slack dumps you into a command line when you get everything installed. You have to configure X before you can run Gnome, Fluxbox, KDE, etc...