Windows 7 Ultimate and Ubuntu 9.10

About a week ago, after booting into Vista, the keyboard and touchpad on my Acer laptop stopped responding.  Editing the Bios settings or using the Ubuntu Live CD, the keyboard/touchpad worked fine so it wasn't a hardware problem.  After trying to dual boot Ubuntu and Vista, I arrived at a Grub "No filesystem found" error.  May be due to the OEM partitioning which was consuming a lot of hard disk space unnecessarily too.  So it was quite easy to resolve to do a clean install.  The Ubuntu Live CD allowed me to access the Windows partitions to back up the little data I hadn't already backed up.

1. Loosely following the instructions here, I first ran Gparted and created one primary partition for Windows and one extended partition for Linux.  In the extended partition, I created two logical partitions, one formatted ext4 for / (root), /home, etc. and one formatted linux-swap (2 GB) for swapping.  Note that unlike the instructions described at ubuntuguide.org, I did NOT require a small partition for storing Grub files
2. Since I have a valid MSDN license, I downloaded Windows 7 Ultimate and burned a DVD with the .iso image.  During the Windows 7 installation, I choose a "Custom" installation, which allowed me to choose which partition to install Windows into.  Yes, this Windows 7 installation does play nicely.  Also, with a clean install, Windows 7 takes a little over 15 GB in hard disk space, compared to the OEM Vista installation.  This is because I don't have the OEM hidden partition containing the recovery media, nor the Windows XP Embedded partition, nor the Acer OEM software, none of which was really that useful. 
3. After testing that Windows 7 was installed properly, I ran the Ubuntu 9.10 CD.  By default, the Ubuntu installation ignored the two partitions that I had already created for Linux purposes.  Instead it proposed to create a fourth partition for Ubuntu exclusively.  However, choosing the manual/advanced option, I could specify where to mount each partition (i.e. for root and for swap purposes) so that the partitions that I created earlier could be put to use.

Now Grub starts initially and allows me to choose to boot into Ubuntu (default) or Windows 7.  Also, no problems with the keyboard/touchpad in either OS.  New life is breathed into my year-old Acer laptop!