Research: dual booting Windows 8.1 SL & Peppermint 5

At this point I have bought a Lenovo laptop, one with Superfish. The picture is from here.

So I have decided it would be better to reinstall Windows 8.1 SL with media downloaded from Microsoft and not Lenovo. While scanning with Avast anti virus, I found multiple "infections", addware or spyware or crapware. Whatever it is, I don't want that on my laptop. I do trust that Avast removed everything, but I might as well go all the way here.

The important thing to do now (before formatting or anything else) is to do my homework.

I am currently downloading an ISO from Microsoft, from here.

I created a Live USB, here is how I did it:

• Downloaded the 64 bit ISO from www.peppemintos.com 
• Checked the md5sum 2eb905b8ff3005ef2fa52e32517d0e5f using Winmd5 free from here. 
• Next  used Unetbootin to create the Live USB

At this page, I learned how to boot from a flash drive. Which I did to test and see that Peppermint does in fact run on my laptop. Good news so far.

More homework underway. Updates to follow as soon as I have progress and time to report.