Where Is It All Going?

Memory? Once I run opera it's down to zero





When I bought the system it said that it comes with a 120g hard disc. I havnt downloaded anything new except the new driver for ati, uninstalled things even.





Wheres the other 50 something gigs? It also seems like thats alot of space being used up?

 

i can help you about the missing gigs
the missing gigs maybe missing due to a hidden recovery partition
about the memory usage
the lower the memory usage the better dont you think

 

How do I get to this hidden recovery partition, and what do I do with it? Im on a f3jp if that helps.

About the memory, so are you saying that screen shot is normal? I thought having physical memory available was a good thing? I'm a noob at this so bare with me.

 

well if it is a hidden recovey partition its better that you keep it rather than delete it as it will help you restore your laptop to company condition if any problem arises
i am not exerienced with vista so sorry i cant explain how you could get to it
well that snap shot seems completely normal
having more physical memory available is a good thing

 

Is the partition the same as the recovery disc? If so I have a recovery disc, which would mean I don't need the recovery partition, correct?

What about the free memory being so low though, thats normal? once I run my browser it goes down to zero free memory. Sorry if im being redundant about the mem thing, im just trying to get a better understanding.

 

Your screen shot shows that your disk is divided into vistaOS (c drive) (67GB) and data (d drive) which is 40GB. You don't seem to be using the d drive at all...

 

Yeah, I was also wondering if that should be added as well. When added all together it still doesn't add up to 120g though, it's missing 10g.

 

There is a recovery partition. In vista, go to the Control Panel->System and Maintenance->Administrative Tools->Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions. You should see the other partition in there. You can delete it, but just make sure you understand what you are doing (you can screw things up fast playing with hard drive partitions). You will also have to resize the partitions once done if you want that space back.

As for the memory. It is bad that you have no free memory, but it isn't surprising. You have 1GB of RAM. My boot uses 996MB of RAM. Yours is probably close. This means when you start your browser, its normal memory usage is enough to max out your RAM. If performance isn't up to par, either add more RAM (2GB might be nice), or get a flash drive or memory card and use it for ready boost. Does that help?

 

Yes it does, and thanks to all who posted. I'm not going to mess with the partition, dont want to mess things up.

I guess the only solution is to get another gig like you suggested for the ram. I just thought that it was stange to have it go down to zero like that, wasn't sure if something was messed up, or if that was normal for this system/os.

Anyways, thanks for the help guys.

 

There is a discrepancy between how windows reports hard disk capacity, and how most manufacturers do. This probably accounts for the missing GB. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk#Capacity_measurements for information...

 

Nice, thanks. Added rep to you guys

 

thanks shyster
hope we were of some help to you
cheers

 

You might want to tweak windows vista by disabling un-needed background services, TSR's, disable indexing etc.

 

The remaining difference is due to definition of the size of a GB by Microsoft vs industry; all HDDs are smaller in Windows than reported by the manufacturer.

OK, since this wasn't necessarily addressed I'll throw this in -- the reason for low free memory in Vista isn't anything that you've got running (although 62 processes is going to eat more than 50); the cause is Vista's new Superfetch feature. Essentially, Vista eats as much available RAM as possible preloading your commonly used software/files into RAM so that it doesn't have to access the HD to get to them, thereby improving system performance. If you go and put 2GB RAM in, Vista will just eat most of that for the same purpose and be able to preload 2GB worth of files instead of 1GB. In any event, your system performance won't suffer because of the reported low physical RAM as it would if you were running XP with little free - it's that Vista has taken a drastically different approach to memory management .