crowded hard drive

hi, on my dell xps m1530, ...with vista..., it says my "OS C:" drive has 63.1GB free of 136GB. i added up all the programs' sizes on my control panel and it came to about 18GB. the only other big things i can think of is my music library which is about 2.5GB. From my 160GB hard drive, it seems that 75GB of space is missing (with my programs from contral panel and music library subtracted). i know all the preinstalled settings like drivers and stuff take up room, but that much? what is sucking up all my space? is this vista's doing???

 

what version of vista. ultimate sucks hdd space like nothing

 

It's not only programs that take up HD space. There are many other possibilities, such as System Restore (default consumes up to 15% of your disk space) or other system files

 

Vista typically takes up around 10GB of space without any streamlining or optimization, that number varies depending if it's 32bit or 64bit. Add Virtual Memory/Page file which is around 3GB and the Hibernation file which is at least 2GB(same size as your RAM). The best way to measure your application size is actually using "Right-click">"Properties" on your " C:\Program Files" Folder. You should then have a pretty large number close to 30GB now add that to your music and documents.

Dell usually has a separate recovery partition pre-installed on your harddrive instead of giving you a Recovery DVD(well, pretty much every manufacturer now) which takes up around 10GB of space as well, subtract that from the 160GB total space.

Now you mentioned that you have a 160GB harddrive, which actually isn't 160GB within Windows as it is calculated as 1024Bytes = 1KB & 1024KB = 1MB & 1024MB = 1GB. For some reason hard drive manufacturers calculate differently as 1000 Bytes = 1KB & 1000KB = 1MB & 1000MB=1GB so the total space number is significantly lower in Windows.

Windows Free space calculation:
Hard disk of 160GB = 160,000,000,000 bytes = 152587MB = 149GB Windows Volume


I'm not surprised that you have 60GBs left, you will need to start removing all the DELL bloatware and unnecessary applications that you don't use. It really all adds up.

 

Your 160GB HDD has 149GB as far as Windows is concerned. Did you mention the OS itself and the space it takes? But anyway why not go straight to the source? In Control Panel click "Folder Options" click "View" second folder down "Hidden files and folders" make sure "show hidden files and folders" is checked. Just below that make sure "Hide protected operating system files(recommended)" is unchecked. Now use the Windows Explorer locate your C: drive. Open and start looking at what is taking up space. If you really want to know all add up the size of all the folders, I bet it adds up.

XP instructions I hope Vista is similar.

 

If you go to my computer, and right click on the harddrive, you will get a disk cleanup utility. You want to run disk cleanup. Then run it again, but go to the advanced mode, and select for it to clean up all restore points. This will free up most of the harddrive space, which is lost to you. I did this on my friends 7k200 in his xps 1710, and it cleaned up about 34 Gb. Yes Vista Ultimate loves to cache itself.

K-TRON