How much space after Vista?

The notebook I ordered has a 100GB harddrive. I heard Vista takes up about 10 gigs or so? So will I have 90GB free? Or is more space taken up still by formatting the drive? I know when I installed an extra drive on my desktop I only had 111GB of space after I formatted it even though it was a 120GB drive.

 

Seller and manufacturers have different things in mind when they say 100 GB. When you buy a laptop with 80gb HDD, for example, you only have about 75gb because the highly intelligent retailers calculate that 1gb=1,000,000,000 bytes, which is of course wrong.

Here's what HP says in its disclaimer (source: shopping.hp.com) :
"For hard drives, GB=1 billion bytes. Actual formatted capacity is less. A portion of hard drive is reserved for system recovery software--for notebooks, up to: 8GB (XP and XP Pro), 9GB (Vista), 12GB (MCE); for desktops, up to: 10GB (Vista, XP, XP Pro), 12GB (MCE)."

 

Well, I ordered a Sager. Would it be safe to estimate that I would have roughly 90GBs available for storage, then?

 

No, with your thinking you will have 87.5GB's. Because you don't really have 100GB's to start with. Now on Vista one of the main reasons for that large demand I think is for backing up and restore points, you should have some control of the maximum allowed for this if space concerns you.

 

I agree with you 100% and am glad you included the HP statement! HP is side stepping the issue and it is a lie. The difference in what is reported has nothing to do with formatting or restore points, that is just an easy lie. I have a 160GB HDD the reported amount is 149GB's which when you do the conversion for decimal 10 to the power of 3 to binary 2 to the power of 30 that works out exactly! It is a 7.37% difference. Not as HP tries to imply your OS is taking this space. It is taking none, what your OS uses is not hidden! One main thing that burns me is instead of explaining nothing is gone or missing they perpetuate it and then blame formatting and the OS!

 

It's base-2 vs. base-10 numbering. Hard drive manufacturers like to use base-10. Software always uses base-2.

Is a megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes? Or 1,048,576 bytes? Is a kilobyte = 1,000 bytes? Or 1024 bytes?

You decide!

 

I prefer the ol' 1024 measurement, myself.

 

How come no one ever seems to have a problem with the concept when it comes to RAM. My point, 1GB is how many MB's? 1,000? No, 1024MB's. Exact same scenario, if HDD MFG thinks 1000MB's is a Gig but your computer does not.

 

Yeah, good point. Really stupid.