vanishing memory

I have a hp pavilion dv6000 and all my memory seem to have just disappeared. I can only find like 40 gB to speak for. Any hints to find the missing memory???

 

well I got a 120 hard drive, which boils down to 100 gigs and all the stuff i have on it only equals to like 40 gigs so u do the math. I dont know this nasa stuff u speak of.

 

I'm guessing you mean hard drive space? How big is your hard drive supposed to be? Some of the common causes of missing hard drive space:

*Because of the difference between binary and decimal representations, the amount of space Windows shows (the binary representation) will only be about 93% of the advertised (decimal representation). So if you have a 160 GB hard drive as advertised, you actually have 149 GB binary, and that's what Windows will show.
*System Restore takes up a lot of space over time. If you go to My Computer (right-click)->Properties->System Restore tab->Settings, you can set how much of your hard drive space is used for System Restore - generally this is a pretty high percentage (up to 12% of your total space, which can be many gigabytes depending on your hard drive size).
*Recovery partitions take up a lot of space. These are usually included in case something goes wrong; they tend to be about 10 GB.

There's all kinds of other things that can eat up hard drive space though - if you've recently put new programs or movies on your hard drive, that could certainly be the cause. If you go to C:\ and right-click on Windows, Program Files, and Documents and Settings, and choose Properties, you can see how much each of those folders is taking up spacewise and narrow down where space is being taken up (it will take awhile for the used space total to tally up).

But 40 GB is still a lot of space. Unless gigabytes a day have been disappearing for no apparent reason - and it's not just System Restore kicking in after an OS reinstall - I wouldn't be worried. If you are losing gigabytes a day for no reason, there's a chance that you have a keylogger tracking your movements and that an anti-virus/anti-spyware check is due.

edit: OK, so about 20 GB missing. 12 GB or so is probably System Restore, another 2 GB or so for virtual memory (C:\pagefile.sys), and 2 GB or so for the hibernation file (which you'll see as C:\hiberfil.sys if you turn on to view hidden and system files in Explorer). Unless those are already accounted for in your 40 GB used estimate. If not, that's where most of your missing space is. The rest may be temporary files - go to Run and type "cleanmgr" and hit enter, then choose the C:\ drive to delete temporary files (Recycled files also may be taking up a lot of space; you can probably delete those, too).

note: These instructions all assume XP; if you have Vista they may differ slightly. I don't remember what the Pavilion 6000 sold with, as near as I can guess it probably was both at some point?

edit2: Oops, misread that as 40 free and 40 used, so 20 of 100 left to find. Michel.K's count is probably the more accurate of what's left to find.

 

im sry for not being more in depth. I actually only have 18 gigs of space left and only 40 that i can calculate is being used up. So in all I dont know were the other 50 gigs are.

 

40 + 18 = 58

Total space is about 93GB, så you should have about 35GB left to "find".

What Operating System (OS) are you using?

 

Grab a hold of WinDirStat ( http://windirstat.info/) and run it. That will give a good overview of where the space is used.