Oh, and one more thing ... that crashed installer is a symptom of a bad installer medium or using a USB drive (does not work with quite a few distros). So just to be safe, burn it to a cd and verify the disc. Also, double-check by running the "check disc for defects option" in the cd boot menu (press any key when you see the white on purple keyboard/person when booting from cd).
Nah. Windows works fine.