Why isn't there 80 gigabytes of free space on my empty 80 gigabyte drive?

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Thank you for the explanation Leo. I was also stumped to where my extra GB's had disappeared to.

what i would like to know is why would windows xp say theres 1 mb or so of free space when i defragged the crap out of it and transferred all the big programs and files to my other drive?

it don't make sense

Alan
http://www.helio.com

Well, for one thing, defragging does not free up disk space. That's not what it's for.

My computer has been messing up lately. Sometimes the internet would work and sometimes it won't. What is wrong with my computer? Also, my new computer (less then 6 months)started with 232 GB free space on my hard drive and some things have been downloaded but not much. These things that have been download have taken about 30 GB of free space on my hard drive. One day after i was finished using my computer i checked the free space and it had 202 GB of free space on my hard drive left. When i logged back on my computer the next day the free space on my hard drive was 70.5 Gb. How is this possible? Also what does System restore do? (Start, all programs, accessories, system tools then system restore) I have done this before and it loaded my info and all but the programs that i installed before the date selected. Does this take a large amount free space off my hard drive because when my computer shut down again i tried to restore it to an earlier date and it took hours to restore it, sometimes it just stops trying to restore my previous works, it says "needs more virtual memory". Please help. My computer is being stupid.

could you pls tell that when i delete any file and even remove it from recycle bin.....then using system restore ..i am able to bring it back...how does it work...are the files not deleted in reality?

"We have just bought an 80Gb Dell Inspiron laptop. The disk properties states total 69Gb, which it says is 74,***,***. I could understand if it said 80,***,*** was 74Gb, but how can 80Gb capacity be claimed for our drive which is 11Gb short?"

Most Dell computer systems have a portion of the disk sectioned off..called a partition. They do this because they usually put system restore files in it, which include drivers and sometimes the OS as a cd/dvd image. So part of that space is likely that. The rest is likely taken up by Windows and windows related files ... and possibly by any pre-installed software/drivers.

I'm Very formilier with windows, However I recently performed a complete reformat of my hard drive because of a shell error that I was unable to fix. I have not connected to the internet or added any files, apps. folders and so on. And I had the same problem befor the reformat. my hard disc is(74G) with a system allocation of 10G and 2G allocated as virtual space. Why do the drive propertys report about 2G less every time I boot up? Now there is less than 10G without adding a single bit. I tried compressing the drive and it freed up a few gigs but it soon began to slowley dwindle. I have a Hunch there is just an error in how the OS calculates free space and reports it. Strangly the free space will get down to 500mb or so and then jump back up to 2.5 or so gigs. What the crap?

it all started way back in the "DOS Days"
I have 2 Quantum 80MB disks, yes I did Say MB from 1988 and both of them have 83.8MB of usable space after formatting with DOS, I also have 2 Samsung 250MB disks and both of them have 262MB of usable space after formatting with DOS, you always got more space up until after the 8GB disks, then everything after that was calculated the other way and sold by the other number
ie if those 80MB disks were being sold today then they would be sold as 83MB disks not 80MB's,
what happened is greed took over, instead of selling you a 74GB disk and getting 80GB of usable space they sell it to you as an 80GB and windows reports it as 74GB and you get almost exactly 80,000,000,000 bytes.
just like the "320GB" disks which are actually 298GB with almost 320,000,000,000 usable bytes

Cheers, Leo Thanks for keeping us all informed with PC info

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