Is there a way of removing/shrinking the recovery partition on my new laptop without voiding the manufacturer's warranty? My SSD is only 120 and when you take away the 8GB for the Hibernation Partition and the 16GB from the Recovery Partition and Windows I'm left with only around 70GB for my programs & media. Thanks guys :0
Yeah, I'm with crapbag. If you do not use hibernation, then get rid of it. With regards to the recovery partition are you not able to make a usb/dvd backup with the manufacturers software? I know I could with the partition that was on my HP/Compaq netbook. This was you have a restore USB key for the OS and can then kill that recovery partition too. It shouldn't affect your warranty, but you better check that.
It is highly unlikely the manufacturers warranty would cover software, so deleting the partition shouldn't cause any issues with that. As above you should also be able to make some form of recovery media with USB/DVD.