Hard drive used space not adding up. Also need partition advice

Ok, was not sure how to put this in the subject line so lets see how well i can explain my issue. I have a new xps m1530. had it about a month. have not installed anything i can not reinstall. have no data on the hard drive cuz i have a home network. I want to re-partition my hard drive to have the OS in one partition and data in another. I am trying to figure out how much space I need for OS and software. If I go to properties on the C: drive it shows 42.5 gb of used space. If I click on C: drive, select everything in that partition and click propteries it shows me that it is about 17gb. What is using the other 25gb? I believe I have hidden files unhidden. Even If I did not it should not be 25 gb's. Any ideas why the big difference?

I am thinking the OS partition should be about 35gb. I plan on a few games, a solid modeling software along w/ autodesk civil 3d & arch desktop. Each product is about 1.5-2gb installed. make another partition for swap file (10gb). keep the recovery, and dell diagnostics partitions. that will leave me 145 gb for data. does that sound about right?

thanks

 

Why not just leave it as one whole disk? I tried what you did and I came up with a 30 GB difference between properties C: and the properties of the folders in C:.

How big is your hard drive? Are you planning on putting your programs on the second partition or with the OS?

 

My hard drive is 200gb. I was going to put OS and programs on one patition and when it is "good" make a ghost image of it. I am new to vista, and like early xp, do not trust it yet. Leave all my CAD files and anything else i accumulate on the other partition and back that up nightly. If there is a more resonable way to accomplish what I am planning I am open to suggestions.

 

That makes sense. Are you going to do a fresh install of the OS or just start from where you are at? I would go with 40 to 45 for your OS and programs to give yourself room to grow. You can reduce it if you don't plan on adding much in the future, but based on what you are using now I think this would be a good estimate. Also you don't need a swap file partition.

 

i was going to do a fresh install from the dell supplied cd's. i like the idea of going a bit larger. i plenty of room on the server for storage.

No page swap partition? it was my unerstanding that it having a un-defragmented swap file would improve performance. is this absolete?

 

I have never heard this practice used on Windows. Linux of course uses a swap partition, but not Windows.

 

It may be left over from needing a large swap file size for my cad progams on older smaller hard drives. May not not be needed on my 200gb 7200 rpm drive. Thanks for your input.

 

How much RAM do you have? To be honest, swapping to the hard drive is just going to slow down your CAD drawing.

 

I have 4gb of ram (3.5 recognized). I have had 40gb+ files when making animations. My old desktop is 1/2 the computer this laptop is. i used to have 2-3 machines all working at the same time and it would take all weekend to render out less than 10min of animation.

 

I got some good info last nite in this thread. I am going to do the reinstall tonite. Does anyone else have any input? thanks

 

What video card did you get? I haven't done animations, but I know Autodesk Inventor likes a good video card.

 

I don't know how large your cad drawings are but on my system I've disabled the swap file completely. Serious performance improvement...

 

I had a similar issue with used disk space not adding up. I recommend using TreeSize Free to keep an eye on what Vista is up to. For me the discrepancy was down to the page file and the hibernation file.

 

I th gt 256 graphics card.

i thought it might be the swap file. did not realize that it would have a hibernation file also. makes since. thanks