@Krishna

The 'masked OEM' is Dell. I have an Inspiron 1545, dual Pentium cpus,
4Gb ram. I could never buy the parts as cheaply as Dell, so I stopped
making my own pcs. Only down-side is an internal wifi not well
supported by most distros except Knoppix.

Gparted says I have three partitions on the Win7 computer:
....40 Mb fat16 DellUtility
....15 Gb ntfs Recovery (for Win7 OS images)
...283 Gb ntfs OS (Win7 that is)

I'm in Harry's camp on writing across OS's. Conservative, that is.
I wouldn't know what to do with a broken Windows set-up other than to
re-install. Hours in a dull process. At least with Linux you can do
a lot of tinkering before giving up. And with, current day Knoppix even
a complete re-install is a much simpler, less time-consuming process
than a Windows install.

BTW, Isn't there a file ownership/mode problem going from Linux
to fat then back to Linux? Doesn't this get lost somewhere?

I have a 350 Gb external USB drive, currently 100% ntfs, that I'm thinking
of partioning to include some fat32 and ext capabilities. However, I'd
be surprised if a poor-man's install will beat my LiveUSB start-up time
by any significant amount. I can get on-line with Knoppix from start of
boot now in 56 seconds. Win7, using the internal hdd takes 60 seconds.