250g hard drive has only 170g usable. why?

[tonyglover9]

my new sony fw11m with blue ray player has a hard drive capacity of 250g, I know you loose some to recovery,system and program files but a total of 80g is a bit over the top. can any one point me in the direction of where the missing drive capacity is? I have only a small amount of music and photos stored.

[Blencogo]

Hi Tony and welcome.

Three reasons for the missing storage: -

1. Vista uses far too much disc space for the System Restore Process. Open the Command Prompt (as an administrator) and either type in or copy and paste this command: -

vssadmin list shadowstorage

It will show you how much is allocated. Google for a method to reduce this amount - it is not quite as simple as with XP.

2. Your Recovery Software is on your Hard Disc. If you look in Computer Management -> Disc Management you will see a Recovery Partition using 7 to 10 GB.

3. Windows cannot count! Because Windows uses the binary system, the nearest it can get to 1,000 bytes (a kilobyte) is 1,024 bytes - calculated as two to the power ten (2^10=1024). So it uses 1024 bytes of your storage to count a kilobyte. Similarly, it counts 1,024 KB as 1MB and 1,024MB to get 1GB. This means your operating system is counting 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30=1073741824) of your storage as 1 GB. Windows measures your 250GB drive as only 232GB.

EDIT: Just found this link which looks good: -

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/reduce-system-restores-disk-usage-in-vista/

[tonyglover9]

hello blencogo. thanks for the info. i will check out want you have told me, it all sounds good. i was a little bothered that i may have had a virus or some one controlling my laptop. thanks again.