Why is there more than one primary partition? The hardware architecture only supports 4, they're valuable! None is particularly full. And that gap in the middle?! Can we spell “fragmentation”? Define it?

Maybe people living in the wild and wooly world of Windows are used to things like this and don't consider it fraudulent when deprived of about 14GB out of 80. But to have that much real estate taken away without even asking!? Consider the percentage if I hadn't chosen a drive twice the size of normal.
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Of course the first thing I did — after minimal setup, as little as possible — was to change the boot sequence on the notebook to enable using Knoppix. I had to know how to do this (F2, DEL early in the boot process are good candidates): other than one large piece of paper (roughly 2-times legal-size) describing the external features of the hardware, Dell included no significant printed documentation. It's all on the hard-drive.