Mike, just like Dragan suggested it should just work right out of the box. If for some reason your wireless hardware is unique a driver can be downloaded and then setup manually.
BTW dual booting will allow direct access to your windows partitions.
I haven't try this but I did see a guy use a USB thumb drive to dual boot his laptop. Like you he wanted to play with Linux before committing. Using the thumb drive allowed him to play with different distro's.
Johnf
John Fabiani
Woodland, CA