content: Yes. To be safe, back up anything important first. Stuff can go wrong (either machine or human error), so it's always good to have a safety net. Before installing, check your drive for errors. There may not be any physical errors, but if there's any weird little filesystem problems, data can be lost. Then defrag your drive. You may need to disable your swap file first as it's unmovable when the system is active. After all that, then boot with Mint, play around with it in the Live session to see how your hardware performs (video, audio, wifi, etc.). Then, when you're ready (and it's probably a good idea to read a tutorial first so that you know what to expect), follow the instructions for installing along side Windows. What will happen is, your Windows partition will be shrunk and the remaining space will be used to create the Linux partition. Then your boot loader will be modified so that Linux will now control which OS boots based on your choice at startup. If all goes well, you'll have two OS's. Most likely you'll be able to access the files on your Windows partition from Linux, but not the other way around. You could probably create a third partition that is FAT32 that both OS's could access.  What I'm currently doing is running Mint in VirtualBox from within Win 8.1. I game in 8.1 and do nearly everything else in the Mint VM. I've got 8 GB of ram so I've given 2 GB to the VM along with 100 GB of HD space. I may do the dual boot thing at some point but I'll do it with a second HD. So far though, The VM performance is more than decent (typing this and watching Youtube from Mint) and I'm not even taxing the system. Depending on how much memory your laptop has, this might be a doable situation. If you've got 4 GB, you could probably get away with giving 1 GB to Mint and the other 3 to Vista, or even try a half and half approach. Linux is a LOT less memory and resource hungry than Windows.