Where have all my GB's gone.

mjenn5

I need some advice.

I have a Laptop which is supposed to have 40gb.

It runs real slow and when I check the free space it says 8gb free.

I have not had this lappy for that long so I am surprised that there is not much space on it.

I can see that I should have quite a few gb's taken up but certainly not the 32gb mentioned.

The computer tells me that the 32gb's are used in the c: drive but I cannot see where. I do not have many pictures on it and no films etc.

Is there a program or anything that will tell me exactly where my gb's used are. As you can tell I am not a computer whizz, more like a plodder.

Any advice is much appreciated.

Kommunist

How about this utility? It should tell you size of each directory. I haven't tried it myself as I am using file manager for that but it seems that it can do the job

Also try to run "Disk cleanup" utility (it is in Start->Programs->Accessories)

In addition, some laptops got hidden partition for recovery, hibernation (not the Windows one), etc...

smcicr

ok, so have you run the disk defragmenter since you got the laptop? (left click on any drive in windows explorer, select properties and then click the tools tab)

that's often a good place to start, you might find you reclaim some space that way.

secondly, the simplest way to find big files is to use the windows search function:
Start -> Search and then look for files by size. try looking for files with sizes over say 100MB and see what comes up - it can be enlightening

you might also want to try compacting things like your mailboxes in outlook or thunderbird or whatever you use - they can get quite large over time (also empty the sent and deleted items folders if you don't need the contents)

trace-j

Are you running XP? I know the Operating System along takes up a fair chunk of disk space. It's not the same for every hard disk its relative, the bigger the hard disk the more space it takes up. Off the top of my head I lost 2GB on my 20GB HD Drive when XP was installed. My partner lost a lot more on his 70GB HD drive.

Malestrom

Its not that XP is taking more space on a larger drive, its because the overheads of formatting a larger drive are bigger, so you lose a proportionally larger amount of the available free space. It also has a lot to do with the way manufacturers calculate the size of a drive, here's a full explanation from Anandtech although this doesn't include file system overheads.

blinky

Might be a hidden backup partition as well for reinstalling the OS in case of failure. Alternatively you might find the installers of all the bundled software on the main HD partition (I know HP do this).

Both use a fair chunk of HD space.

Hard drive manufacturers use 1000 = Giga, rather than 1024 used commonly for memory. Then you've got formatting overheads.

In my machine 160Gb HD Formatted = 149Gb capacity (NTFS)
80Gb HD Formatted = 74.5Gb capacity (NTFS)

Myosin

Don't Dell store their backup OS Software on the HDD? IF so would that take a sizeable chunk of space? I'm a little concerned about this myself as I'm near to plunging into a Dell laptop

mjenn5

I thank you for all your help.

After many attempts at disc Cleanup and numerous defragments along with searching for large files I have now got 20gb free.

Laptop is working much better now and faster.

I will keep on top of this defragmenting now as it makes such a difference.

When I had first got this lappy I tried to copy my baby videos onto dvd unsuccesfully and had thought I had removed all the attempts but there was one still lurking in the machine taking up a huge amount of space. Needless to say it has been deleted now.

Thanks again