Why does my C Drive show 124GB under properties when it only has about 81 in the folders?

Am I somehow partitioning 40GB for system restore and don't know it? If so, how do I change this?

I just reformatted last night, and put Home Premium x64 on along with the programs I regularly use and a few games. 124GB seems like a ridiculous amount for one day.

Pic's of my C drive contents.

 

System restore is set to use a determined amount of space on your drive (% of total capacity). Every time you install something or update windows, a restore point is created. I think the default amount is 10% so if you have a 500GB drive adn you just did an install fest of your programs, it is likely that system restore is taking up a lot of space. You can look up how much space is used in ssytem protection. You can configure the amount of space taken by system restore there too.

 

"install fest" haha. that it was. it took about all night.

i'm going to have to do a little more research on this system restore storage stuff...

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current usage: 9.30GB

max usage: 2% (10GB)

guess i'm still off by about 30GB but at least i'm a little closer to an explanation.

 

What about PageFile and hibernation file ?

 

That too, those are hidden files so they might not show up. How much RAM do you have? Both the page file and hibernation file have the same size as your RAM by default.

 

8 gigs of ram... is that 16 more right there?

 

hidden hibernation file is almost 2.5gb
this is the first folder i delete when i buy a new laptop especially after the nightmare i had with the alienware.

last time i done a thorough cleanup i found over 40gb of system restore points so it shows it can build up over time.

 

Many small files on a filesystem with too big clusters?

Example:
If you have 1000 text files each being 1kB in size their cumulated file size will be 1MB.
If you use an NTFS file system with the default cluster size each cluster cell will be 4kB in size. Due to how the file system works each file occupies at least one cluster cell. So each of your 1kB files occupies one 4kB block and therefore 4MB of your storage space will be used.

Depending on how many files you have that are smaller than your file system's cluster cells* a more or less noticeable amount of the available disk space will be wasted.
The solution is to decrease the cluster cell size when formatting the partition or to archive the small files in a single file which in the above example would consume 1MB.
Both ways will decrease the performance when accessing the files. Afair Windows provides an option to archive chosen folders.

*) more precisely: Every file that does not have the exact size of a multiple of your cluster cells will use more space than it's size. A file with a size of 1.001MB will still use 1.004MB of storage capacity. But of course the effect becomes more noticeable with many small files instead of few big files.

 

wait, wouldn't the system restore and all other files show up under the c drive since that's my only drive (no partitons and where windows is installed)?

 

Because those files are usually hidden from the user. Hyberfil.sys and pagefile.sys are located in the root partition and are hidden, that is 16GB you aren't seeing right there in C:\

 

See here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...ete-windows-folder-reinstall.html#post8281414

 

Stop any guesswork, use a file manager that shows everything, hidden files, system files, directly displays all folder sizes etc etc. Am recommending FreeCommander - freeware file manager, it's excellent. Learn how to set it up for your needs. Running it as admin one can do anything (but be careful!).