Is not to go whole hog onto the hard drive at first. Load Oracle's free VM software and try it first in there. Next step if you like it, is to see how it operates direct with the computer hardware and that's easiest done by loading to a thumbdrive. You can get slow speed thumbdrives 5-10 MB/s for $10-12 for a 16GB and triple that if you want fast and get a Sandisk Extreme Flash Drive in a reader which can handle it's 70-100 MB/s speed on a USB 3 port. A Virtual Manager like Oracle's VMWare runs interfere with the hardware. Using a $10 thumbdrive for a few days to insure the particular distro you like works well "out of the ISO" with your computer can save you a lot of time and effort and disappointment if you were removing windows, or putting it at jeopardy by doing a hard drive install without knowing for sure first.
When you get to a hard drive install, if you are going to divide a windows partition to carve out one or two for the Linux distro (/ for root + a swap file/partition), be sure to chkdsk the windows, then Defragment, to make sure windows data is at the front of the partition. Always carve off room at the back or right side in Gparted or Kparted or whatever partition manager you use, to avoid messing up windows MBR and boot process.
If you don't care about the Windows and already cleared the hard drive, then by all means, have as much fun and frustration as you can, lol.