Why so little memory?

I got my 1720, and one of my questions is why the total available memory is only 136gb, with my 160gb hd, i only have 123 out of 136 available....I knew some of it would be used for backup and stuff, but almost 40 gigs?

 

One word for you: Vista.

Some of it's backup options can take up a ridiculous slice of your harddrive space. It's a percentage I think so the bigger the drive, the more space it'll take...

 

Well as far as I know...Vista is 6 gigs, backup is 10 gigs, mediadirect is 2 gigs, plus formatting and preinstalled programs, recycle bin, etc. Sounds about right, I think.

 

Yeah, a hard drive advertised as 160 gb means 160 billion bytes; a gigabyte is more than one billion bytes, however. Because of this, 160 billion bytes means about 149 gb to your computer. Then some gets taken up by backups and mediadirect, and you're left with what you have.

 

There are some partitions which Vista will not show on My Computer such as the Dell Media Direct partition, Dell Recovery partition and Dell Diagnostics partition which will amount to around 10 or so....

And then there is that way hard disk manufacturers use the metrics 1 KB = 1000 bytes but for Vista and the actual metrics it is 1024 bytes.... So eventually you would be getting lesser hard drive space than mentioned roughly around 150 GB or so...

 

sounds pretty normal actually, you would be surprised how much things add up. I have a dual 250Gb raid zero xp setup, and after the os, formatting, and software, I only have about 420 of usable space. On the opposite end of the spectrum, my ubuntu install and all of my documents/programs uses only 4.92Gb.

 

That's correct and pretty much sums it up.

All is normal.

 

heh yea, your hard drive has a bunch of extra stuff that comes with vista, like roll back.

 

That sounds right for a 160 , I always delete the extra partitions and reformat the whole drive, as stated earlier though, even doing that wont give you 160 Gb, as your drive really isnt that big to begin with, and its not dells doing either, its marketing by the manufacturers , and has been this way for a loong time. At first it didnt really have much of an impact when we were using MB's, but as drives keep getting larger and larger , its very noticeable.

 

That's why the terms GiB, MiB & KiB have started to be used for base 2 numbers. They mean, respectively, giga binary bytes (pronounce gibibytes), mega binary bytes (mibibytes) & kilo binary bytes (kibibytes).