Well, here’s the new setup. As you can see I was afraid to do much w/the Win partition except resize it. Even there it wouldn’t give up very much space considering how much free space it had (not cluttered with fragments either). I think 25GB should be plenty for my root and home (user :)) partitions and God forbid I should ever need 8GB swap (unless of course I’m attempting to SWITCH USER!) lol
Anyway I used the little 10GB partition (would we have said that 20 years ago?) for a Lucid Puppy install. I find it to be tiny and screaming fast and I like that but SUSE is quite a bit more elegant and configurable. Even my aged Mom (that ‘other’ user) is comfortable with it after one session; of course it’s got 125 size icons (two of them, Chrome and LibreWriter) and huge buttons and fonts and menus but it’s practically foolproof. Now if I could just 'fool’proof my profile! 
Unfortunately the fool has root permission whenever he feels like it. Oh well, that’s how I learn; break it and fix it. Painful sometimes but also gratifying.
dhcppc0:/home/marty # fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x02b7e848
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 20386485 365606260 172609888 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 * 365606912 488396799 61394944 5 Extended
/dev/sda3 2048 20385791 10191872 83 Linux
/dev/sda5 365608960 418854911 26622976 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 418856960 434767871 7955456 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda7 434769920 488396799 26813440 83 Linux
Partition table entries are not in disk order
Disk /dev/sdg: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000a4a58
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdg1 * 2048 65538047 32768000 c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdg2 65538048 483327999 208894976 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sdg3 483330048 976773119 246721536 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
dhcppc0:/home/marty # cat /etc/fstab
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD2500JS-00NCB1_WD-WCANKD616567-part6 swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD2500JS-00NCB1_WD-WCANKD616567-part5 / ext4 acl,user_xattr 1 1
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD2500JS-00NCB1_WD-WCANKD616567-part7 /home ext4 acl,user_xattr 1 2
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD2500JS-00NCB1_WD-WCANKD616567-part1 /windows/C ntfs-3g users,gid=users,fmask=133,dmask=022,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs noauto 0 0
debugfs /sys/kernel/debug debugfs noauto 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts mode=0620,gid=5 0 0
dhcppc0:/home/marty # df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
rootfs 26204236 6596628 18276464 27% /
devtmpfs 1014308 36 1014272 1% /dev
tmpfs 1022304 1760 1020544 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 1022304 676 1021628 1% /run
/dev/sda5 26204236 6596628 18276464 27% /
tmpfs 1022304 0 1022304 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 1022304 676 1021628 1% /var/lock
tmpfs 1022304 0 1022304 0% /media
tmpfs 1022304 676 1021628 1% /var/run
/dev/sda7 26396748 1232376 23823700 5% /home
/dev/sda1 172609884 83151188 89458696 49% /windows/C
dhcppc0:/home/marty # free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2044608 1480932 563676 0 47416 803368
-/+ buffers/cache: 630148 1414460
Swap: 7955452 0 7955452
dhcppc0:/home/marty #
So thanks again dvh and everybody else; I did print out the relevant posts to advise me as I hacked away with sledge hammer and chainsaw (if only I could use forceps and a scalpel like so many of you).