Qs Regarding Shrinking C drive or adding additional partitions for data, pictures and such. Dell Inspiron 15r N 5110

My system info:  I have a Dell Inspiron 15r N 5110, i7-2670QM chip with a 1TB 5400 RPM HD and 8 MB RAM (?max amount of ram for 2nd gen i7), Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. Disk  Management: Disk 0: Basic 931.51 GB. OSDisk (C)  917.84 GB NTFS. Recovery 13.67 GB HTFS. TTL size before shrink  939867 MB; Shrink space avail: 400661 MB. That would leave me with an enormous C system drive of 539206 MB (not the 100 GB or less I was hoping for). Using safehouse I have made a number of encrypted vaults, ttl about 180 GB while messing around. However, most of my stuff does not need encrypting and searching encrypted vaults is a pain, though total commander software seems to do it - but only free for 30 days. I have 557 GB of free space. Backups via USB external Seagate drives already done.

In part as a former mac user (where partitioning seems commonplace) and in order to make virus checking, etc. easier and much faster I would like to somehow partition my C drive. 50-100 GB should be fine from what I have seen posted on the net for the size of a system C drive. 100+ GB partitions each for data, pictures, movies, etc would be fine. I would not need most of the HD space at this time.

1. How can I prepare my current C disk so I can get a shrunk volume under 100 GB? I can certainly offload the safehouse vault-volumes. If needed I can also uninstall/delete my Microsoft Office and Adobe products which use multiple GB of space, though deleting and later reloading these would be a pain. However, the registry files might also get quite bloated by doing all of this. (I have CCleaner software to help with this).

2. Postings on the net are ambiguous about repartitioning voiding a Dell warranty. It would also seem to make sense to avoid messing with the Dell recovery partition. I have seen postings about other hidden partitions and boot block information that should not be messed with - though I do not see these mystery partitions via disk manager.  I am unclear if simply "shrinking" the C drive and then reformatting the unused space into other drives (D E F G etc) would achieve my particular goals - assuming I can really shrink the C drive considerably. Would shrinking the existing C drive mess with any hidden Dell data files required for support or emergency recovery?

3. I do not think there are other ways for me to accomplish this without a complete reinstall of the base software available the day the laptop shipped. I would also prefer not  to spend several days undoing some bloatware, reinstalling all of my apps, files, etc.

4, My boot times are significantly longer with the M Office and Adobe products added. With my former laptop, as long as I was able to keep the system partition "clean", the boot times were reasonably fast. I don't know if simply moving the program and data files, plus shrinking the C-system drive, will allow a speedier boot vs a truly redone or clean install with multiple partitions in place. (Does partitioning really allow for faster boot times?)

Thanks