Dual-boot Windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.10

[c5vetter]

Okay, relative newbie to all this! Windows 7/Ubuntu 12.04 dual-boot computer died on me, so bought Windows 8 HP machine and want to dual-boot Ubuntu 12.10 (64bit). Am having all kinds of problems making this happen. Have disabled Secureboot, and all the other things in BIOS. Have attempted to manually set partitions rather than loading beside Windows 8. Nothing seems to work! So, guess I am asking if there is a STEP-by-STEP process that someone can point me to, so I can figure out why this is not working!?

Okay - installed gparted and here is what I have

dev/sda1 ext4 /boot 2.7g
dev/sda2 ext 4 / 3.78g
dev/sda3 ext 4 /home 232.83g
dev/sda4 fat32 boot/efi 33.0m
dev/sda5 swap 2.79g
unallocated 354g

So, am thinking maybe I blew away Windows 8 and did not know it? Am looking at the 354g unallocated! So, am now thinking to just put the Windows 7 Pro disk in and click restart and hopefully can load Win 7 and go on from there? Do know Ubuntu and Win 7 play nicely together as that is the way old laptop is configured. Only bought new as old is dying!

[TNFrank]

I tried to install Ubuntu in a computer that I'd bought with Windows 8 and ended up giving up. The UEFI BIOS just isn't very user friendly IMHO.  I ended up taking the computer back to WalMart and got a full refund then used that money to buy TWO older laptops and installed Ubuntu 12.04.2 on both and got rid of Windows 7 altogether. 
The Windows 8 laptop crashed 6-8 times in the week that I had it and the final straw was when my wife picked up a Trojan horse that messed up one of the files that I couldn't fix.  I'd been living happy with an iMac that I'd bought in '02 so we'd not had to worry about getting virus and stuff but dang if Windows didn't slap me back to my senses.  Never again will I run a MicroSoft/Windows based Op System on any computer that I own.  Linux is it from this point onward.