I really want to love Linux, but it's not helping

I have an Acer Tarvelmate laptop 8104WLMi. I was so excited to put a Linux distro on it. I chose Ubuntu, because it is so popular, and supposed to be the most user friendly. Now, I am a total noob about Linux, but I want to learn. I pop the cd in, it freezes during instalation. Ok, I google and find out I need to boot with noacpi. Ok, cool, I can install it now. Oops, it's still not booting. I google some more, and find out that Linux isn't really compatible with newer laptops.

Ok, I have a live cd to, that must be ok. Now I can't even boot into windows. Grub gives me an error 22. It looks like I'm going to have to format my laptop to get windows back. I already tried a recovery and all of the other tricks.

I really want to try Linux, but there is no way it's getting near my AMD64 pc. I don't want to take the chance of having to format to erase it when it is not compatible.

I really want to love Linux. I really want to try Linux, but it just seems too risky.

Do I have to go on ebay and buy a cheap, old, laptop, so I can run Linux on it?

Maybe it will run fine on my desktop, but I really don't want to risk it. I have important stuff saved on there, and it's a pain to recover it all from an OS who is supposed to make my life easier.

I don't know much about Ubuntu but as far as making windows and linux play side by side I would suggest either SUSE or Red Had Fedora. In the case of SUSE you can do your windows install first then run the linux instiall which will resize your partition and put linux on right next to it and give you your choice of Lilo or GRUB for a bootloader.

Also if you want to try linux on your AMD64 machine you could install Damn Small Linux on a USB device and boot from that, or perhaps even install Knoppix to a USB harddrive and configure it to boot.