I'd like to give Zorin OS a test drive in a separate partition. I tried it out booting off a USB drive and liked it. I'm hoping it will speed up my computer.
It looks like your best bet would be to resize your Windows partition to create space for Zorin OS. Depending on how much use Zorin OS will see, you will want plenty of room. At least 164gigs of space. You could run it on 48gigs or so. I wouldn't do that...
First, you will want to defragment your C: drive since you will be resizing it. Defrag it a couple times. Then resize the partition using either your Windows partition manager or the the Gparted Partition manager that you can find on the Try Zorin Disk.
Once your partition is resized, reclaim the newly created space and format it to ext4.
Boot from LiveUSB Try Zorin and run the installer - Select "Something Else" instead of the "install alongside" option. Select the ext4 partition you formatted earlier as your install and be sure to set the mount point in the PopUp window. You will see
Format to - ext4 journaling
primary partition and
mount point - you can just set mount point to /
Alternatively , you can create the desired amount of unallocated space using windows disk management and install directly to the space using the something else option. The installer will format the space for you. The mount point would be the same also. /
Edit: To create the space use shrink volume from windows disk management.
WOW! If this goes correctly, this might end up being the most successful install of Zorin OS that I have seen a user do, to have in dual boot with Windows. Looks like you've already gotten all the advice that you need.
So, I guess all I will say at this point is good luck!
Yes , but be aware the .exe files used to install windows applications don't run natively on Linux without software such as wine or crossover. There are alternatives , but many programs for windows simply don't run on Linux. That is the reason why myself and many others dual boot to begin with.