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    My HD Size is 140gb?

    Discussion in 'HP' started by McGrady, Mar 10, 2008.

  1. McGrady

    McGrady Notebook Virtuoso

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    I have a dv2550se hp notebook. my box says 160gb HD, but my c disk properties shows a 140gb capacity. o_o
     
  2. tumnasgt

    tumnasgt Notebook Evangelist

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    It is always slightly less because HDD manufacturers measure GBs slightly differently. And HP take about 10GB off for the recovery partition
     
  3. McGrady

    McGrady Notebook Virtuoso

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    Yeah I took that into consideration but where is 10gb :x
     
  4. flipfire

    flipfire Moderately Boss

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  5. McGrady

    McGrady Notebook Virtuoso

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    i skimmed it, the chart says i should have 149gb. i got 140, pwnt 9gb.
     
  6. tumnasgt

    tumnasgt Notebook Evangelist

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    A gigabyte is actually 1073741824 bytes, whereas manufacturers say it is 1000000000 bytes. So the difference adds up quickly.

    So 149GB less the recovery 8-10GB is 140GB
     
  7. McGrady

    McGrady Notebook Virtuoso

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    false advertising much?
     
  8. tumnasgt

    tumnasgt Notebook Evangelist

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    One of the manufacturers has/had a class action against them for the size problem. You think companies would learn, but apparently not.
     
  9. Lithus

    Lithus NBR Janitor

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    Until everyone starts counting in binary, the companies aren't doing anything wrong following what they've been doing for years.
     
  10. Apollo13

    Apollo13 100% 16:10 Screens

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    HP likely has a recovery partition taking up about 10 GB of space; it ought to appear as "D:\". If it doesn't, it may still be there but merely be in a format that Windows cannot read. There's a variety of programs that will be able to detect it, though, and some that can delete it and add it back to C:\ if you wish; the article mentions one program (though I haven't tried it myself).

    You almost certainly have 149 GB total (otherwise it was false advertising), but it might take a bit of effort to get control of all of it. Of course, if you don't need that 9 GB, you're just as well off to leave the recovery partition as it is now in case you ever do need it.
     
  11. tumnasgt

    tumnasgt Notebook Evangelist

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    I have to disagree, if you are buying something that works in binary, the device should be rated accordingly. Imagine if a car company said a car will do a top speed of 250mph, when it actually did 250kph, while more extreme, it still seems wrong for companies to do dodgy conversions to make their product look better.
     
  12. Lithus

    Lithus NBR Janitor

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    If you want to get technical, the HDD companies are complying to the standards set for the industry.

    A Gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas, a Gibibyte is defined as 2^30 bytes.

    It is the operating system that is using the wrong definition of the word Gigabyte when reporting actual space.