This post is about how I installed windows 7 and Fedora 12 on my HP laptop / notebook DV2500 / DV2700 and how I partitioned the disk.
Most of you already have some version of windows pre-installed and windows 7 doesn't need any guide on how-to-install. Its that easy. Anyway, this are the partitions I made on my 160GB hard drive.

Windows 7 (C drive)- 30GB primary
System Reserved - 100MB primary (i didn't create this one, windows 7 did that )
Fedora 12 - 13GB extended
Data - The rest of the Hard drive (yes, /boot for fedora 12 is on extended partition)

After installing Windows 7, hardware drivers, essential software like antivirus, adobe acrobat etc I am left with approximately 15GB of the C drive. Thats pretty cool compared to vista which took around 45GB but it included all the pre-installed HP stuff. I am sure 30GB is going to be quite sufficient for windows 7. With windows 7 laptop stays cool and the fan is on most of the time but very very low and it doesn't bother. So, for HP laptops known for heating issues, this is definitely a very good improvement.

From with in windows I created the 'data' partition leaving about 13GB for fedora.

Fedora 12 and its partitions:

• Download the Fedora 12 DVD ISO image from HERE 
• Fedora's Live-USB-Creator from HERE and install it. 
• Plug in your 4GB USB drive and open the live usb creator, you can see 'use existing live CD', click browse and point to where the ISO image file is and then click 'create live USB'. It takes some time.
• Once that is completed, your USB is NOT yet ready! with this USB when we reboot our system we can go up to partitions and then it throws an error. This just did not work for me.
• So, open the USB drive and from the folder 'packages' delete everything, this folder contains all rpms.
• Now, copy your Fedora-12-i386-DVD.ISO image file into your USB drive, not into any folders with in the usb drive but directly under the drive.
• You now may reboot your machine with your usb still plugged and it will take you to fedora installation.
• Just follow the onscreen wizard until partition, choose 'custom layout'

Partitions in Fedora 12:

• After selecting custom layout you'll see two hard disk's: /dev/sda - system harddrive and /dev/sdb - usb drive.
• /dev/sda already has three primary paritions -
• /dev/sda1 30GB,
• /dev/sda2 100MB,
• /dev/sda3 109GB(data).
• We now need to create the 4th partition /dev/sda4 and this is going to be our extended partition by default from fedora installation wizard. And we'll slice /dev/sda4 according to our preferences.
• /boot is a required partition, so select /dev/sda and click 'new', mount this on /boot, give a 200MB for size. This is our /dev/sda5 within our /dev/sda4 extended partition.
• Now, with in our /dev/sda4 we still have unallocated space which we can slice. I'd suggest like this:
•  Swap partition - 1GB atleast
• /home - 3GB or 2.5 GB and the rest to /

With the above settings we have these partitions in summary:
/dev/sda1 - 30GB windows C drive
/dev/sda2 - 100MB system drive
/dev/sda3 - 109GB and
/dev/sda4 - 13GB, this is further divided into
                  /dev/sda5 - 100MB for /boot
                 /dev/sda6 - 1GB for swap
                 /dev/sda7 - 3GB for /home
                /dev/sda8 -  Rest of the drive for /

After the partitions make sure to choose to install the bootloader to /dev/sda, by default it'll be /dev/sdb. Do not forget to change that.
And then continue with the rest of the installation.

Fedora 11 was very bad on my HP DV2500 laptop, heat was way too much. After googling and going through forums I came to know that the culprit was firefox, for some reason. Then I tried opera in fedora 11 and the heat was definitely very low.
Well, Fedora 12 improved on that, laptop stays absolutely cool. Like in windows 7, fan stays on most of the time but it does't bother and is very very low. And its the same when I used firefox but I got used opera and its a pretty good browser.

Did you choose to install openoffice later to save some time with Fedora OS installation? Now, instead of downloading openoffice or any other packages from internet we can point our yum repo file to use repository from the Fedora DVD ISO file or from the USB if you have the image file on USB. Let's assume the ISO file is on USB:

First, loop mount the ISO file to a temp directory

• mkdir /opt/temp
• mount -r -o loop /media/Fedora/Fedora-12-i386-DVD.iso   /opt/temp  (your path to ISO image will be different, wherever is the ISO give the absolute path to it after 'loop')

Lets go to /etc/yum.repos.d

•  cd /etc/yum.repos.d

Create a 'old_repfiles' directory and move all files into it from /etc/yum.repos.d

• mkdir   old_repfiles 
• mv   *  old_repfiles/

Note: We moved all the files from /etc/yum.repos.d to /etc/yum.repos.d/old_repfiles, we're gonna leave them untouched and restore them once we're done so that system is back to its normal settings.

Create a file named 'fedora.repo' in /etc/yum.repos.d

• vim fedora.repo

Copy and Paste the following into the fedora.repo file

•  [fedora]
  name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch
  failovermethod=priority
  baseurl=file:///opt/temp/
  enabled=1
  metadata_expire=7d
  gpgcheck=1
  gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch

Save and Exit by typing

• :wq

Now, install whatever you wanted to, in this case openoffice, lets try the writer

• yum install openoffice.org-writer 

Now, once you're done

• delete the fedora.repo file that you created from /etc/yum.repos.d
• And you gotta restore all the repository files we moved into /etc/yum.repos.d/old_repfiles back to /etc/yum.repos.d

Becareful with the 'mv' command, you might loose data.