Ubuntu Linux 14.04 Special Edition DVD
 

First I would like to thank you for letting me join this forum. My first question is can I remove windows 8.1 from my HP laptop and just install Ubuntu Linux 14.04 Special Edition DVD I ordered it and it will be here Tuesday And I would love to do a clean up on this new laptop and never have to see windows on it again I hope I set the bios to boot off the DVD drive first then the hard drive any help would be great:study:

The quick answer would be, "yes, you can". I hope you didn't pay for this "special edition". I see that Amazon is selling it for $9.97 and the amazing claim that the price was reduced from $39.99. You can download a copy which costs nothing from the Ubuntu website and burn a DVD yourself. As you said you need to make sure that you have adjusted the bios/uefi settings correctly giving the boot priority to the dvd drive. That's easy enough to do. Give a shout if you have any problems. Have fun. (I'm sure you will).
jdk

Also be aware that most Win 8 hard drives are partitioned in GPT format. I bought a Win 8 HP laptop and I shut off secure boot, put UEFI in legacy mode, partitioned the drive with a new MSDOS (MBR) partition table, and installed the OS of choice...

Not sure exactly what you are ordering. Hopefully it will be a dvd that is exactly the same as you could download for free.

The dvd ought to be able to boot into a "live" state. That means if you boot to dvd it should come up and mostly work correctly. This is where you decide if you want to use linux on this system. If most or all works OK then using a few tips and common tasks it should be possible to install.

A word of warning. Some of these disc's are not fully correct. You may end up needing to download your own disc image and burning it or running it from a usb.

If you want you can consider installing this to a flash drive or usb drive for testing.

Might consider making windows 8 recovery media if possible now too.

If jdkaye is correct in that is the one on Amazon, you might think twice about that. First, the price claim is ridiculous and so is the claim that this is the claims that this version has "spectacular changes" - that's ridiculous. Like others have said you can download it yourself for free, or if you don't want to, I would suggest getting it from the "where to buy" link on this page at distrowatch:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=ubuntu

That company seems to have a good reputation and has been a sponsor at distrowatch for some time, so I would assume we would have heard by now if they were not reputable.

Not trying to rain on your parade, but if you start from a bad copy, all will just be overwhelmingly confusing. Also, the latest version is 14.04.1 not necessarily a big problem, but it saves you from a whole lot of update downloading.

Oh, and I would suggest that using your email address as your user name is not a good idea. It leaves you open to a lot of unwanted email of the spamming variety. Why not change it to something less... uh... revealing.
jdk