any ideas why reformatted hdd is showing high amount of used space?

I have a 160gb HDD. I recently had to reformat because of a nasty virus I had on my computer. When I go into properties for my C drive, it says the capacity is 149gb (yes I know that this normal). It says that I have 22.9gb used up but the only things that I have installed are windowsXP, some drivers for things like the GPU and WLAN, a dvd decoder, and Nero.

I know windows takes up alot of space but does 23 gb seem like alot for the operating system, a few drivers and some DVD software?

 

Because it's GiB and that means Gibibyte. You can read about that overhere

Ans 23GB? That' pretty much

 

System restore could be one issue. Every time you do something it creates a restore point. They can add up. If you're not using it you might want to turn it off.

 

I heard that if you had reformated from within Windows, you need to delete a windows.old file (i think, might be wrong), which is a former copy of your OS.

 

So does this mean that the virus could still be in one of those files? My computer is running alot faster, but for somethings, like accessing internet explorer it still runs a little slower than it should be running. It was one of those viruses that is specifically made to scam you into buying anti-virus to remove it (aside from slowing my computer down and locking task manager it bombarded me with pop-ups about a particular spyware removal program and made fake windows warnings that linked me to the website).

Is there a way to remove these restore points? I also forgot back-up some word files (I remembered to back up all my save games, but forgot the important stuff), so might I be able to get these back from the restores files b4 deleting them.

 

Sounds like you should remove all partitions, create new partitions and reformat.

23GB for Win XP is way too much.