Hard disk drive space - advertised vs. actual

I just acquired a refurbished Dell XPS 15 L521X notebook PC with a hard drive of 750GB nominal capacity, preloaded with Windows 7 Home Premium. (See signature for specs.) I understand that Windows calculates the capacities of hard drives in terms of the 1024 unit--one kilobyte (KB) is 1024 bytes, a megabyte (MB) is 1024 KB, and a gigabyte (GB) is 1024 MB, which decreases the detected capacity accordingly. Using these units, a 750GB hard drive = 750,000,000,000 / (1024 x 1024 x 1024) = 698.4919GB. However, the detected capacity was 684GB, a difference of over 14GB. What might account for this 14GB difference? I also have a related question--my hard drive came with 648GB of available space, suggesting that at least 36GB of space is occupied by the Windows OS and associated bloatware. The control panel indicated that the installed programs occupied 3.21GB. Does Windows 7 home premium occupy some 32-33GB of hard drive space?

Thanks for reading and any information.

 

Thanks for your suggestion, I used the disk management tool and indeed it showed a recovery partition of almost 14GB. The sum of the capacities of the hard disk drive and the recovery partition are 684.96GB + 13.67GB = 698.63GB, which is the expected capacity of the whole hard drive. I didn't realize a recovery partition had been made prior to shipment by Dell. Now I need to figure out how to utilize it...

Thanks again,

 

Regarding the second question posed in my initial post of this thread, approximately how much space of the boot hard drive is occupied by Windows 7 home premium? Upon receipt of the XPS 15, its "My Computer" function indicated 648 of 684 GB was empty. Of the 36 occupied GB, approximately 3.2GB were occupied by Dell-installed programs, implying the remaining 32-33GB were taken by the Windows 7 OS. Does this seem plausible?

Thanks,
PG

 

You can delete the recovery partition if you wish via Windows Disk Management and then combine the unpartitioned space with your main partition. I'd recommend keeping the recovery partition unless 14GB is that important; it will come in handy should you ever want to restore your computer to its factory state.

P.S. On the topic of recovery, burn your recovery DVDs when you get a chance; most notebook companies will charge for them if for example your hard drive crashes and you're then unable to burn them.

P.S. 2 get the Properties of the C:\Windows folder and see how much space it takes; it should be well under 30GB unless Dell or another program has crammed stuff in there (shouldn't be the case).

Congrats & good luck with the new notebook. The specs look pretty nice.

 

The Windows swapfile and hibernation files each take up an amount of space equivalent to your system RAM. If you have 8 GB or more, you can safely shrink the swapfile to 1-2 GB (some programs don't work properly if you disable it entirely). If you don't use your PC's hibernate functionality, you can delete this file as well. A quick search will net you the appropriate how-tos.

 

Thanks for the advice. The Windows folder totaled just over 24GB. Regarding recovery CDs, Dell apparently offers them free one time to PC owners; I'll order them shortly. Regardless, I'll keep the recovery partition intact for now.

PG

 

Thanks for the tips, they certainly explain where the 10-15GB of hard drive space went. I attempted a Google search for "swap file" and came across many references to "page file". I surmise "page file" and "swap file" are synonymous. I could not locate the hibernation file. Even when I used the "clean disk" function, hibernation file did not appear in the delete options. Anyway, it's probably not critical, as I plan to keep the hibernation and swap files intact for now.

PG

 

To delete your hibernation file:

Open a cmd prompt with Administrator privileges and type in:

powercfg -h off


If you compare the free space before and after you issue the command above, the difference will be the size of the hibernation file.

To enable it again (waste of space alert ), in the same elevated privileges cmd window type:

powercfg -h on


Swap file and pagefile is the same (just from different generations of Windows).

 

Thanks much for the pointers. I'll try out the hibernation off and on commands when I decide to deactivate the hibernation file.

PG