a question about harddrive

Hi, I just bought my new dv6500tse yesterday and I started to install some applications such as Microsoft Office 2003 and another game which should take up roughly around 5-6 GB. The harddrive I have originally have 120 to begin with. But when I got my laptop, it has only 103 on C drive and 8 GB on recovery and free space on C drive only has 87 GB. Well after i installed my programs and remove some useless ones, I still have 87 GB. Then, this morning, i removed the game I installed yesterday which should give me more than 90 GB free space. But instead, I have only 70 GB free space and I don't remember i installed anything after that. Sorry, I kind of new to the hardware stuff, can you guys tell me what's wrong with my hard drive? Thanks in advance.

 

You are probably losing space to Vista shadow copy service. By default it will use 15% of your hard drive. You can change this or turn it off, but I would wait until you need the space before you do.

 

Did you empty the recycle bin and clear the temp files?
System Restore and a permanent swap file will also take up "invisible" HDD space if activated.

 

thanks for the replies, I'll try what you suggested.

 

Another thing to keep in mind is that the actual formatted capacity of a hard drive will always be lower than than the manufacturer's stated capacity. For example, a '100Gb' hard drive will really have only about 93.1Gb of actual usable capacity.

This is because unlike most metric measurements, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes (not 1000 bytes), a megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, and so on. However, hard drive manufacturers go with the notion that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes (and so on and so forth) when advertising the capacity of a hard drive. So when you go by 1024 instead of 1000, you will discover that, once you work out the math, that you will have less capacity than what the hard drive manufacturer stated.

Just my $.02.

 

What we need is comprehensive megabyte reform. A law that dictates that a kilobyte is ALWAYS 1024 bytes, whether it it used as a sales term or a technical term. Then the actual capacity would match the friggen box!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiB

 

This seems to be turning into the stock answer for this problem, but the real issue is that Vista uses 15% of the drive for Shadow Copy and restore points. The type of discrepancy caused by shadow copy is much more noticeable than the marketing miscalculations.