Where does all the HDD space go?

I couldn't find another topic concerning this, but what the hell happens to some of your hard drive space when you firstly open the notebook?
I understand some of it is reserved for the OS and other small programs, but in my case it's strange.
It's a 250GB hard drive, yet in my computer it says for total size '224GB' now i've got 195GB free space, yet i've only installed one game of 2GB and that's all! On the box it said that around 12GB is reserved for the OS (vista), and inside the drive Windows only makes up 8GB. There's also another drive for HP recovery which is 8.21GB, yet it seems nothing adds up. Why does it say for total size 224GB? What happened to the 26GB? Something i'm not seeing?

 

the hdd manufactures say that a gigabyte is 1 billion bytes while windows considers a gigabyte 1073741824 bytes. The hdd manufactures do this just to make their products look better than they really are. Kind of a scamming us but what can ya do?

So this is where the 26GB's are.

 

also please refer to here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=2233651#post2233651

 

*sigh* thanks a lot guys for the information then!

Also while i'm on the topic of hard drive. Would it be a good idea to partition your hard drive on a laptop? My hard drive on the desktop computer is partition into 2, although i really haven't seen the point of it?

 

Vista's out of control System restore which, unlike XP, cannot be adjusted/controlled. It's either on or off with no way for the user to dictate how much space to be allocated for it. On a 250Gb HDD it can use quite a bit of GBs.

 

So can it be turned off? Just make one system restore for the month and turn it off?

 

When you turn it off it will delete all the restore points but why would you want to? You have a 250GB(decimal) 224GB(binary) hard drive and 195GB is still free and unless you are seriously lacking any HDD space then it makes sense to turn off system restore, otherwise keep it on.

 

You can certainly limit the amount of space allocated for System Restore:

Both Vista and XP:
http://reliancepc.com/reliancepc/menu/tips/restorepointmax/

 

Yeah you're right about that.

Thanks for the link TomTom2007.

 

After I made my recovery discs.. I deleted and merged the recovery partition to my primary with acronis disc director software.. works like butter. There is no need to keep that HP recovery partition.. thats a waist of 8 gigs for sure. I was not aware that you could adjust system restore with vista premium. I thought you had to upgrade to ultimate to get that feature. I will have to check out that link.


Edit.. ok I went tot he link. Oh crap.. thats a hack.. the vista restore resizing tool exe.. thats interesting. Anybody have success using this?

 

^So do you suggest to remove the HP recovery 'drive' part that takes up 8GB after the recovery discs have been made?

 

if you do create only 1 partition, doesn't the program start using that single partition to create restore points?