Netbook Linux .exe

Seg66Mat

I have a Samsung netbook that I bought over the Christmas holidays. It is running Windows 7 Starter Edition, and I don't want to cause discussions on Windows or Starter Edition or anything, I'm just not ready to surrender my entire machine to Linux at this point, especially because a netbook has such limited hardware that I'm not sure how easy it will be to go back if I need to.

I'm wondering if there is a .exe file or some such thing that I can download and run from within Windows without an optical drive as netbooks don't have one and I'm too cheap to go out and buy one for the sole purpose of running Linux, and my 512MB flash drive is more than enough for my backups but not nearly enough for distro's like Easy Peasy or similar ones that can be installed from a USB flash drive.

I know that there is some sort of an Ubuntu installer to run Ubuntu as a program in Windows, but I've tried the Ubuntu Netbook Remix on another machine and can't stand it, and also am not sure how regular Ubuntu or even the remix would work because that's basically creating a VM on a very underpowered machine. Windows 7 plus Ubuntu together would cause extreme slowdown.

Please advise me as to what my options are, if any, for installing a Linux distro to have alongside Windows 7 on here, without needing a flash drive or an optical drive.

Thanks.