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