Hard drive issues!

Celegorm

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Are you also accounting for the difference between how the manufacturer's advertise hard drives and how windows see's them? If I'm right, HDD manufactuers mesure 1 gig as 2^1000 bits of data where computers read one gig as 2^1024 bits of data. If you do the math, it's a big difference in space.
 
Upon using disk analysis program, it says that my C drive is using 36.xx GB of space. That is with a bunch of large programs on a Vista 64 OS. Brand new computer, just built it last tuesday. 640gb Western Digital Hard drive. Opening the computer selection under the start menu says that I have used 116 GB. WTF? I have looked for solutions all over the web. Used disk cleanup, disk defragmenter, etc. Where is the other 80GB I supposedly used?!
 
While in Windows Explorer or Computer try right clicking on the drive's icon for properties as well as going to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Storage and open up the Disk Management tool.

The properties will immediately show the pie chart amount of drive space used. Besides the space used for the Windows directories and programs used for those files and folders Windiws itself will reserve a good amount for the paging file used for virtual memory.

Drives are sold by decimal base 10 measurement while Windows reads drives in binary base 2. After partitioning and formatting the 650gb you end up seeing 605.359673500061gb. That's before Windows is even installed!

Now subtract the space used up for Windows and all programs along with the space reserved by Windows for system purposes. That there plus any files you have copied onto the drive or simply downloaded like all of the latest updates will tend to chew up even more space along with all of the temp install folders.
 
Thanks for the reply. I went and checked it out. I was already aware of the ratings and that I really only had about 596GB out of the advertised 640. That wasn't a big deal. I subtracted all of the Windows and program files (which only came out to the 36 gigs) and the computer states that I have used 478gb left. Not that that is bad, but holy crap. Would you have any idea where I can find those copies or dump files that may have overlooked?

Any other help is appreciated.
 
Windows does a lot of behind the scenes housekeeping chores and makes logs about what it's doing and what is going on with your operating system. If you leave them alone the files can get massive. Some you can disable, some you can't. I do a lot of beta testing of software and some hardware so my logs get big in a hurry. Once a week I run findjunkfiles to clean them out.
http://www.brothersoft.com/find-junk-files-119783.html
You'd be surprized how much drive space you recover. Along with Ccleaner you can keep the clutter to a minimum.
Also right click on the hard drive icon and select properties. Then click the disk cleanup button and follow the prompts.
 
There's a Windows Installer cleanup tool you use as well. That is used before you see all of your programs installed right after a fresh copy of Windows goes on. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

The "crap cleaner" as they call it is found at http://www.ccleaner.com/ The one thing to note about that is the registry cleaner is limited and the constant use of automatic cleaners can see valid entries removed at times causing problems with various programs installed.
 
I always do a disk defragment and cleanup at least once a week. It seems like if I am downloading a 2 gb file then delete it from the comp, the comp says that I am down 4 gb in usable storage. WOW. Vista has already been giving me problems. Outside of the shiny package and hoo-ah prettiness, there are a lot of dumba$$ bugs, but whatever. I'm a little nervous about the crap cleanup and Microsoft install cleaner. Don't really want to delete necessary files.
 
Besides pointing at Windows having bugs you may want to see what else besides the files you are downloading are coming along with them. spywares, adwares, etc. Every so often you have to clear out the offline content since that will start taking up space there.

Both of those are generally safe to use while the crap cleaner's uninstaller and registy tools leave you wondering at times. The Windows cleanup tool there is used normally just after Windows is put on for cleaning up the temp folders the Windows installer leaves.
 
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