well i would recommend trying a live cd if you really want to try out linux all you have to do is set your bios to boot from cd and then pop in the cd and reboot it will automaticly boot up the cd instead of your windows partition. and this wont even touch your harddrive. not will be saved on your system so it wont hurt your current windows settings. i recommend the slackware live distro called slax here is a link you can download the iso and burn it to a cd using nero jst make sure to burn it using the burn iso cd option

http://slax.linux-live.org/