1. XP does not need all that space. XP need only have a few gigs at most - plan to give it 10 gigs. The rest is to be free space. I'll tell you what to do about it later.
1a. give serious thought as to why you need windows - if you have ever done dual boots before, you'll know that windows does not play well with the other children. These days, everything you want to do in windows can be done in linux.
The thing is brand new? never done anything in windows on this machine yet?
2. Back up any personal files you want to keep. You don't need to back-up windows because you have the install disk right?
3. Normally you will have to make all your files visible then defrag the drive. Since this is brand new, it shouldn't be required. (Defrag anyway - it'll tell you if things have been used or not.)
4. Boot from disk1 (or the dvd) - I believe the disk druid will let you resize partitions these days. Otherwise, you'll want qparted - available in varous live distros and on generic rescue CDs.
Follow the instructions.
When you get to the disk-druid, you'll use the advanced options and resize the existing XP partition ... this will be listed as having an ntfs file system.
Next, you want to select partitions for linux.
You
could just select the default to be stuck in available free space. But better is as follows:
partition mountpoint type size
boot /boot ext3 2Gb
swap n/a swap 0.5Gb
dos /usr/dos vfat 1Gb
home /home ext3 20Gb
root / ext3 all the rest of the space
a lot of folk make a usr partition (mountpoint /usr type ext3) as well.
don't worry about RAID or LVM - you only have one drive.
Then the installation can procede normally.
In windows, you need to define the dos partition as another hard drive.
In linux, you'll be able to mount the dos partition normally.
This is used to share files between XP and Fedora without headaches.
Once things are going, you should visit
www.fedorafaq.org and read everything. Also visit
www.mjmwired.net for the FC4 install notes there.
Personally I wouldn't reccommend FC4 for a newbie. OTOH: crash course time
I'd have suggested Mepis or Ubuntu.
However - you are strongly urged to do away with windows completely.
What do you need windows for anyway.
... Since the laptop came with a 100gig drive and XP has it all. I would like to give it linux 35gigs ... 
