Installing another OS on my laptop

I am considering purchasing the Acer Aspire 5672WLMi Laptop.

Seen here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16834115223

As you can see it comes with Xp Home edition, which is crap in my opinion.

I have Windows XP Professional, but this will be my first laptop so I am not sure if there are any things to keep in mind about re-formatting and re-installing a different OS onto a laptop.

Do I need special drivers from Acer? What about the partitioning they do to the hard drive? They make two 45 GB partitions and one small recovery partition and format them with FAT32. I would get rid of them, make one partition and format with NTFS.

I just want to make sure I don't wind up with a dead laptop because I am new to doing this.

I have built desktops for years but it's a no brainer to install an OS on a desktop. Hopefully the same is true of laptops.

To be clear, I do not plan to "upgrade", but rather FDISK, FORMAT, and RE-INSTALL to a blank disk.

 

Before you fdisk, I would make the recovery cds (just in case). There should be no other problems. GL

 

just to clarify:

i'm pretty sure fdisk has been deprecated and Home and Pro are identical except that Pro allows you to log into a domain and isn't limited to Simple File Sharing.

if you've reinstalled an OS before, it's the same deal on a notebook, the only issue you need to worry about is if you have some form of 'media partition' that allows you to play dvds/cds without booting into windows.