One other thing that you should consider since you are new to using ubuntu is a custom installation CD, personally I have one made for ubuntu 8.04 and beyond(part of this is because I actually had to manually create the drivers for some of my hardware peripherals which can get a bit tedious, as well as a few custom commands that I saved to the /bin folder. The only problem with the custom install is your /home will not be there, but as long as you have a backup(or a separate partition as you stated) you will be fine.