New 700m, Hard Drive space Available?

I just recieved my new 700m with the following specs.

1.6 gig M processor
1 Gig memory
40 Gig hard Drive
Office
Norton
DVD/CD RW
Wireless
Ect.

My question regards the amount of space avaiable I have on my hard drive.
Without touching the computer it tells me that I have access to 26 Gigs. My total available is around 33 Gigs leaving 6 used for programs already installed.

I'm curious as to where the other 7 Gigs of space went. Under properties is says that my total available is 33.

I would assume that it would say 40, with 6 used for programs, leaving me 33 or so Gigs of pesonal space.

Can someone clarify this for me?

 

one place is the difference between 1000*1000*1000 for human mega, giga and computer 1024*1024... for mega and giga etc. These things seem sort of a sales thing, seems like size on the box is 1000*... and the size displayed in most places is 1024*....

Also the disk is in chunks and written and managed that way. First there is the sector size of the disk but most systems chunk this much larger. So this means write one byte or some other number and the amount of real disk space eaten is the same.

 

u lose about 4 gbs total right off the bat due to dell's image restore partition + driver backup partition... the rest is due to installed OS + installed applications + the math alluded to in the above post.

reformat and reinstall to get back the 4 gbs from the dell partitions. reinstall only the programs you need to get back some drive space from unwanted apps.

 

I'm fairly naive when it comes to computers, but I've heard many mention reformatting a new computer.

So far I've done some of the alterations mentioned in a Sticky under Hardware for tweaking XP.
One such change I made was changing the startup apps, but now when I start up I get a window that tries to get me to reset it to the original settings. All I changed was QQtask, realplayer, Musicmatch ect. Stuff that I don't use, (use Itunes for music).

So when it comes down to it, a 40 Gig hard drive is really gives you 27 Gigs to play around with ?

 

tweaking is a bandaid covering the real problem of unwanted apps taking up drive space, registry space, hogging system resources, etc. you'll notice a greater gain in speed by reformatting and reinstalling your OS/apps.

 

Here's something even worse....

I got my new 9300 with a 40 gig hd, and it tells me there's only 24 gigs free!

So how do you think I feel?