I warn you I am an acknowledged idiot and am invariably wrong, however, in your situation where as I understand it you want to install a version of Ubunto but are a complete newcomer to Linux, (And want to be able to check what's going on from Win 7) my best advice would be to use VirtualBox.
Running from a virtual machine is unlikely to slow things down to a critical level while the actual Linux install should be easy enough, much easier than native usually due to the standardized virtual hardware.
VirtualBox used to be a little hard to configure for file sharing but is now much improved and dead easy.
There is also an excellent downloadable manual.
Good Luck, Tony Cook