Ubuntu partitions

Ed

You're right, sometimes vendors include small partition for their software diagnostic and recovery tools.

Do you ever use this computer for anything except Linux? Do you intend to?

If not, it is quite ok ( and even quite common ) to devote all the HD to your single operating system.

Hi :)

Lol, in linux-land there are always alternative points of view. Linux is all about offering freedom OF choice rather than microsquish imposed freedom from choices. So we do enjoy disagreeing whenever we get a chance :)

Given that the machine is not limited to 20Gb hard-drive or something low like that then i would recommend keeping the two little fat partitions because you never really know what the future might bring and you might appreciate having the option of using them one day maybe. It total up to about 3Gb at most on a hard-drive that's at least 160Gb. On some older machines there is sometimes a noticeable difference between the read/write speed of a Primary Partition compared with a Logical Partition (inside an Extended Partition) but this is no longer the case and may have been only distorted perception rather than the reality anyway. With newer mbords the addresses of the data on Primary Partitions are just as long as the addresses of data on Logical Partitions and the addresses are all in one place. Also if either of those 2 little fat partitions do fall over it wont affect the other partitions on your drive anyway.

So there's no need to remove the partitions really and there is always some remote chance of needing them sometime in the future.

If you think performance is a little slow then it might be worth reorganising your partitions a bit. The read/write speed at the front of most drives can easily be twice as fast at the start of the drive as it is at the end. Obviously this isn't the case with SSD drives which just eventually suddenly slow down to merely incredible phenomenal speeds having started as being ridiculously incredibly phenomenally fast ;)

On a non-SSD drive i would re-arrange the partiting so that you have your main OS&programs on a separate / partition just after the fat ones. It only needs to be about 6Gb or even less and the new ext4 file-system seems a little faster than the ext3 one. If you had 1Gb or less of ram then it might have been worth putting your swap partition just in front of the / partition but i don't think that's an issue with your machine. The data & settings in your /home folder on it's own partition can then be relegated to the 'end' of the drive without appearing to be slow because Ram (&swap) will be caching data so that read/writes for data can be queued more intelligently.

However, i think how you already have your partitions is likely to be 'good enough' and only small gains might be made through a lot of effort implementing my suggestion.

I think your machine is something like this?
http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/notebooks/laptop-inspiron-14/pd.aspx?refid=laptop-inspiron-14&cs=19&s=dhs
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/dell-inspiron-1420/4505-3121_7-32486109.html

One way to get radically faster speeds is to try out a few smaller distros as Ubuntu is probably the most bloated distro in linux-land. One of the Slackware distros will be radically faster but there are many others distros from the other 6 or 7 families, most of which might be faster in normal operations. Possibly you would find Debian itself (head of the family Ubuntu is in) is radically faster, but it's apps are all quite a lot older. The main trade-off is that Ubuntu is usually at the top of the list for a good reason. It all tends to just works a lot more easily than almost any other distro and has much more recent apps than many. However, i would recommend using Ubuntu as your main distro and then experiment around with other distros and see which you can tweak into best shape for what you need. Multi-boots are quite common in linux-land for this kind of reason.
http://distrowatch.com/

Hopefully something there helped!
Good luck and regards from
Tom :)