9300 hd question

Hello everyone,

My 9300, which is a week old, with no programs installed by me yet, with a 40gb hard drive, states that there is 32gb of total space on the disk, but only 24gb available for me to use.

I have called dell a couple of times about this already, and one tech says this is normal, while another says it is not. Does anybody know about the large chunk of space taken out of the hard drive leaving me with only 24gb out of 40 to use? I know several gb goes to the os and other dell installed programs, but really, 16gb taken is a bit too much. Does this have anything to do about the restore partition that dell now installs on its laptops???

Thanks for any info

 

part of it yes. The restore partiton will take up several gigs (i think 5 or 6gb).

that actually could be correct...
40gig-6gig(restore)-10gigs(windows/junk)=24 for you to use.

Was the 24 including windows? or is that the amount of free space?

 

You could wipeout the recovery partition and re-install, but if something were to go wrong won't have the recovery partition to assist you.

 

All of what everyone has said is true, in addition browsing the web can "fill" the hd with junk. This is controlled by you via the ie properties. Also the restore points can also take alot of space (worth the space in my opinion but ...) this is also controlled by you I think the default is some % of the hd size I forget. All of this can addup too.

With only 40gb you should evaluate all of this stuff. Personally I would shrink the IE junk holder. Also the hd cleanup is worthwhile for junk.

 

Yes, the 24gb is the "free space" to use. My desktop (a dim 4600) has a 40gb hd and only like 5 gb was taken up when I first got my computer. I still have 22gb left so I didn't think I'd need more than 40 when I bought my 9300, but seeing 16gb taken out of the total hd space as new was really just too much!

 

Also what a hard drive manufacturer calls 40gb is going to show up as around 37gb in windows. They define a gigabyte as 10^9 bytes and windows will define it as 2^30 bytes. It’s a bit misleading. You can see how big the partitions are on your drive by right-clicking My Computer and selecting Manage. Then select Disk Management. You should see your hard drive in the lower area and how it’s partitioned.

 

yeah that is standard protocol for junk software. Dell just has it so load down plus the like JJD, all of the stuff that I.E. would store if you were using it alot. Do a reformat...

If you want more than the 40gig, you have a couple of options. Obvious one, is if you are happy with your laptop (besides the HDD problem), buy another internal drive and replace. Second option is to make or buy an external hdd (could buy an internal hdd and put it in a case. )

If you replace your HDD, call Dell and request the OS CD. They *should* (not promising though) send you a XP cd.
Good Luck

 

it is really what you define 1000 to be

human 1000
computer 1024

this changes everything 1024*1024... you can di the arith and see that if the units are larger the number of them is smaller, kinda like the difference between liters and gallons etc. The amount of stuff is the same.

 

Like I said you may also want to check the amount of space dedicated to system restore. It is under system in the control panel. This space is the amount of space used to store restore points in case you blast something. All things being equal the bigger the better. I have mine at the max but I am always fooling with stuff and I use this system for development si I worry about killing it. This can get large if a couple of gb seems significant to you.