Ubuntu is designed to be user friendly and is pretty easy going as far as "need guru" goes. I'd suggest the people suggesting you DO need a high degree of skill aren't running Ubuntu.

Download the livecd/dvd image from the nearest mirror and see if it'll fire up without incident on your machine. After that you can either continue and install it (dual-booting is the default) or decide it's not for you and shut the machine down, remove the disk and there's Windows again.