First thing to do is burn all the photos on to DVD .A standard DVD-R you can get about 4.5GB onto on discs. DVD-r is cheap and reliable. But a Avoid the DVD RW.
Do not alter the second partition. (You already knew that, but I wanted to say that before somebody else.)
Yes, windows 7 is smaller that Vista. But it stores data the same way Vista does. Most of the stuff on the commuter is stuff he put there. -Right?
The difference is size of the Operating system would be a small gain.
My personal recommendation is to not change the OS on a laptop unless you really, really have to do it.
Here is the best option, and other here will back me up on this point.
For modest investment, you can get a much larger hard drive for the laptop that is the same case size, takes about the same power but can hold twice as much data and programs. But you will need the help of a friend with a desktop PC to "clone" the contents of the old drive to the new one.
Later the old drive can go in an external case and be used for "over flow" for the stuff he collects.
