mysterious pile of Vista to push aside for Fedora installation

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

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.