Newbie question about hard drive

Hi, I recently purchased my dell 1555 with 250gb harddrive 7200rpm.
While i was looking around my computer, i noticed some "unusual " things. I was wondering if this is suppose to be normal..
well here goes: first of all I seem to have 2 hard drive one called OS and one called recovery. The space of the two are 218+ 14.6 = 232.6gb. Where is my 17.4gb of extra space? lol

Another question is, i noticed that I already had an used space in my OS of 51.5gb ... Already 25% of my harddrive is gone?? All i did so far is install warcraft3 frozen throne to play with friends... which will only take 1gb of space or little bit more. So i decided to set all the hidden folder to be visible and I highlighted all the folders in the OS harddrive, and it came out to be around 29gb..

So.. according to the OS, I wasted 51 gb, but the total file size that i found was to be 29gb.. Is this normal? like magically 22gb of space is gone?

Haha sorry if Im so sensitive about these little things >< it's my first laptop and i dont want any problems with it thanks for the help in advance.

 

Well... computers do funny things... for one....
Is there anything in the recycling bin?

Also, operating systems do take quite a bit of room... More so now than before. The harddrive also never gives you all 100% of the drive due to formatting. I have a 120gb and I know I am "missing" about 5gb.

Not an expert... but that's from my experience

 

The recovery partition is to allow you to reformat your computer to a factory image should you need to do so. You won't see 250GB of capacity because of the way manufacturers market the size of their drives.

 

Actually those are not separate hard drives, but partitions in the same hard drive.

 

Hard drive capacity will always be different than what its label says. Labels are measured in terms of 1GB = 1,000MB, but within Windows, a GB = 1,024MB. So, you still have all that space, it's just divided differently.

 

Harddrives don't show the actual space printed on them because 250Gb is decimal and the real space is binary. Conversion from one to the other differs in case of large HDD quite a bit.

As for the 51Gb used...its the OS (about 12-15Gb), the utilities shipped with the computer (can be up another 20Gb) and the system restore images which are made periodically and when you install something. This can take up to 30Gb in short time!! If you need the space just turn it off, but be ware that in case of some issues you will have to reinstall windows or do a restore to factory settings from the recovery partition (and you will lose every file you made since turning the computer on for the first time)

 

If you want to know the hard drive's actual capacity, take what it's advertised as and subtract 7.2%. Mastershroom explained why.

250GB advertised - 7.2% = 232