When I got my new laptop (A Lenovo G780), my plans had been to remove Windows 8 and set up a multi-boot system of Windows 7 and Fedora. Before I get there, though, I'll give a bit of back story.

I had a ton of annoyances with the Start Screen, and the lack of even a registry value that would enable the comfortable Start Menu (such as the one available in the developer preview). That was literally the only qualm that I had with Windows 8. I loved that file transfers could be paused and provide a pseudo-transfer queue. I also love the ribbons in the File Explorer. Finally, I love that all I have to do to gain access to all the administrative tools is to right click with my pointer in the bottom left corner of my screen. After asking around, I found something called "Classic Shell." It revived the Start Menu. With some tweaking, I found it to be sufficient (Although, I still want an official Start Menu).

A few days later, I figured that it was time to set up the multi-boot system that I had planned, except with Windows 8 in place of Windows 7. I downloaded all the necessary driver installation files, and I wrote my installation disk (I got it from DreamSpark. No warez for me.) to a thumb drive and booted. Unfortunately, the installer wanted some drivers that I couldn't find anywhere. It would not allow me to continue at all. I wallowed in annoyance for a few days, but I soon remembered that Windows allows for the re-sizing of partitions.

I happily accessed the tool, only to find that I would only be able to re-size by around ten GiB. Thinking about it for a minute, I realized that it must be data in the space that is preventing me from re-sizing it. I installed Defraggler, and here's what I saw when I first:

I was pretty confused by this. I have some ideas about how it could have happened, but I don't know for sure. Anyway, I instantly thought that this confirmed the idea that it was data in the area that I wanted to re-size to. I got down to defragging. When it was finished, I was annoyed to see a MFT file still sitting at the end. In my annoyance, I downloaded multiple applications, freeware and trialware, to see if it would budge. Finally, I came across an application called MyDefrag that claimed that it would move it. I installed it and let it do it's thing. About fifteen minutes into the operation, I zoomed into the pixel representing the file, and I was annoyed to see that it was not a MFT file, but "AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\Transcoded_000". I waited for MyDefrag to finish, and deleted the file. When I attempted to re-size the system again, it was a success.

Moral of the story: Things may be a lot simpler than you may think.