I'm not exactly sure what all of the partitions shown in disk manager are for. I would almost bet the farm that I didn't have this many partitions when I originally bought my laptop.

The laptop came with Win8 and I upgraded to 8.1 as it rolled out.

A few months ago I did a factory restore as well.

It's also possible I may have installed Dell Backup and Recovery more than once, I'm wondering if this has something to do with it. It just seems something is wrong and that I shouldn't have that many partitions, I certainly don't remember there being that many when I first got it.

In particular I'm wondering about the 6 recovery partitions, 5 that are small and within disk manager appear to be empty. Though I do believe the 6th recovery partition, the large one does actually have the recovery data; because at one point I used a third party tool that indicated it wasn't 100% free space as disk manager shows.

There is also a 490 mb partition that is unallocated, , really confused by that, I'm sure that wasn't there originally.

I've done some reading here and elsewhere about this, but I'm still confused as to why I have 10 partitions, what they are, and what is necessary.

If anyone can give me some insight on this I would really appreciate it.

Here is a screenshot of Disk Manager:

Inspiron 15R (5537, Mid 2013)