I just bought an inexpensive desktop computer: Acer Aspire E380. - MS Vista Home Premium - Athlon 64 x2 4200+ - 3G DDR2 (so it has AMD-V (virtualization hardware)) - 250G SATA drive I have not booted into MS Vista yet. I have not agreed to anything. Vista has not installed itself. The machine came with no CDs or DVDs: all software is preloaded but not installed (I think it does that at first boot). I have booted a live CD and had a look around at the disk. I am confused and dismayed at what I see: All four primary partitions are already defined. Among other things, this makes it hard to add a new partition. Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 892 7164958+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 893 15615 118262497+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/sda3 15616 30338 118262497+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA) /dev/sda4 * 30339 30401 506047+ c W95 FAT32 (LBA) All partitions seem to have stuff in them: Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 7164956 901548 6263408 13% /media/PQSERVICE /dev/sda2 118262496 8080364 110182132 7% /media/ACEROS /dev/sda3 118233600 7779840 110453760 7% /media/ACERDATA /dev/sda4 498125 125918 372207 26% /media/ACER_SERVIC BTW, all but the first are VFAT, not NTFS. Any idea what all this crap is about? It looks like enough to fill four DVDs. The Acer manual is vague and content-free. Their web site doesn't seem to address this. Any idea what the best approach to dealing with this is? I think that I need to keep Vista available, even if only for warranty support. Knowing how greedy MS OSes are, I guess that I should let it install before I try to take some disk space away from it. "Restoration" tends to wipe everything else out on a drive.
