New Dell Laptop, Time to Format and Reinstall?

Carbo said:

Again, thanks much for the info. One more bit of confusion: UEFI vs BIOS. Do I install Windows 10 with or without EUFI?

I expect, your laptop being new and coming with Win10 pre-installed, you are already booting UEFI, in secure mode, through Windows Boot Manager, with the disk already in a GPT partitioning scheme. If you boot from Windows install media (use F12 at very beginning of start sequence to select that medium to boot from), you should already be UEFI booted and Windows install will use GPT consistent options for your clean install. If you delete all partitions during the install, Window install will, if left do its own thing on a completely unpartitioned GPT disk, create the following partitions:

1. a 450 MB Recovery partition (containing Windows Recovery Environment and supporting advanced boot options)
2. a 100 MB EFI System Partition (ESP) which is what your system will boot from
3. a 16 MB Microsoft Reserved (MSR) partition, part of GPT layout standard, reserved for future use, and
4. the remainder of the disk as your operating system, i.e., the primary Windows 10 partition.

From that point on, you can use Disk Management, diskpart, or a 3rd party partition manager to shrink the OS partition and add others as you see fit.

Carbo said:

I'm surprised to read that a Windows 10 installation will automatically create 4 partitions when doing a clean install. My point of reference is Windows 7, where a clean install could mean a "C" drive only if that's what you wanted. But if that's the way it is, time for me to join the party. Thanks for all the information and help.

Those 4 are standard for a GPT disk scheme. What you were accustomed to under Win7 would have been an MBR scheme. GPT is a bit more fault tolerant and gives you capability to install many more primary partitions on a given disk (not limited to 4 as in MBR) - no more fiddling with extended partitions containing logical partitions and so forth to have more than 1 or 2 extra partitions.

Carbo said:

Is it possible to erase all partitions and just have one "C" drive? That's always been my preference.

With a legacy boot and MBR partition layout, yes, but it requires some purposeful fiddling. You might want to consider the merits versus the disadvantages, however, of forcing Windows and your machine into that configuration, which has become a bit obsolete and probably will become more so.

Bear in mind that 3 of the 4 GPT partitions will be quite small in comparison to the rest of the disk by today's standards.

Carbo said:

Yeah, probably best to go with the flow. Thank you for all your help.

Yes Sir...

The info on those 4 GPT partitions - is the same info you will have on 1 MBR partition...

But instead of re-writing 1 whole MBR partition to fix something

You can fix just 1 small GPT system partition - because they separate , boot, recovery, OS and you can split everything else there after