Did I Get Fucked?

[Undertow]

I have a question to anyone that can offer their opinion, expert advise or not.

I bought a name brand laptop a few days ago for a damn good price and think I got fucked on the hard drive space. In the advertisement and on the box it says it is supposed to come with 160 GB. However, when I click on the C drive it says I have only 122 GB available out of 140 GB. This is a brand spanking new laptop, right out of the box. Anyone know what could be up with the hard drive problem?

Other than that, I like it a lot. The price was great, something you don't come across too often. I pretty much payed $380 for a laptop with:

Vista
15.4 inch screen
2GB memory
DVD burner
HD ??? Supposed to be 160
Built in Wi/Fi.
Other software/accessories

Basically, I have about a week to return it. After that I am stuck with it. Odds are that I won't be able to get an exchange because they sold out in a matter of hours. It was one of those "while supplies last sales"

If you guys were in my shoes would you keep it, get your money back, or call someone and bitch? I have never heard of someone missing almost 40 GB that should be there. Any suggestions?

[BlondNblue]

You may actually have 160 GB hard drive. On 'C' drive it sounds like the OS combined with all the programs included with the machine plus the proprietary bullshit they throw in is coming close to 20GB worth of space.
You should also have a 'D' drive used as a recovery partition, and it is probably another 20 GB. In reality the 'D' drive is on your HDD...so 20G on C + 20 GB on D = 40GB added to your 120GB available = 160GB.

I must admit 20GB for the OS and software systems is HUGE, as is 20GB for a recovery partition.

You can remove most of the clutter you'll never use though.

[Undertow]

You may actually have 160 GB hard drive. On 'C' drive it sounds like the OS combined with all the programs included with the machine plus the proprietary bullshit they throw in is coming close to 20GB worth of space.
You should also have a 'D' drive used as a recovery partition, and it is probably another 20 GB. In reality the 'D' drive is on your HDD...so 20G on C + 20 GB on D = 40GB added to your 120GB available = 160GB.

I must admit 20GB for the OS and software systems is HUGE, as is 20GB for a recovery partition.

You can remove most of the clutter you'll never use though.

Thanks for the reply. I know what you are saying would be true if I was using XP. But I don't think I have another drive on Vista, as my D drive is my DVD burner. I wish it had XP, Vista seems harder to learn your way around, among other things.

As you said, the 40 GB discrepancy is huge for software and recovery. I need to do some looking around the system when I have more time and see what the deal is.

[Undertow]

I had to go into Administrative Tools/ Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management. I was able to account for 150 GB. I guess I have 2 partition drives that weren't assigned letters and didn't show up on the My computer menu for some reason. I still plan to find the other 10 GB !

[BlondNblue]

If you know about BIOS it will tell you the size of it.

[Mr. Drummond]

Vista will choke on a notebook with only 2GB of memory if you run any programs that are the least bit memory intensive. 4GB is a good starting point for Vista notebooks, IMHO.

Of course the notebook is probably upgradeable to 4GB...

[White_Is_Right]

I doubt that you got shafted. However, there is an issue that most folks are still to this day are unaware of. Perhaps Undertow already knows this, but it seems to me that even if he does, most people don't. So I should make this post anyway.

It's the issue of marketing. For marketing purposes, storage is measured differently than how it's measured for actual storage purposes. For obvious reasons, the companies will want to make the specs sound better, without actually lying, so they get technical.

For example, a gigabyte for marketing purposes is 1,000,000,000 bytes. However, for storage purposes, and what the OS does, a gigabyte is really 1,073,741,824 bytes. So when you see the amount of storage in your OS, the number of gigabytes you see will always be less.

So if you buy a 500GB hard drive, in the OS you will really see 465.66GB.

I think this behavior is atrocious on the part of the hard drive companies, and should cease. However, this difference has always been present. In the past, the difference was less of a big deal. However, it's getting more noticeable.

[Clorox]

Also, if you have Norton Antivirus pre-installed on your laptop, it takes up a hell of alot of disk space. Especially if you have the full suite.

[Jacques]

Depending on a number of factors, some of your disk space may be used in a hidden partition.

Frequently, Dell, HP and other PC vendors create a diagnostic partition on each disk that leaves their factory pre-loaded with an operating system including windows.

This partition may be used to boot the machine in the event that the primary partition becomes corrupt or otherwise unusable. It also contains hardware diagnostic programs and other utilities that are very helpful for service personal.

Another thing to keep in mind, some of the high-end hard disks actually pre-allocate some of their space to be used only in the future if and when some sectors on the disk fail and become unusable. When this happens, the disk will detect the failed/failing sector and re-map any data on the failed block of blocks to a good block from the reserved block pool. The upshot is that you disk may be a bit smaller initially, but it will provide generally more reliable service over its useful lifetime.

I hope some of this explains your missing mega-bytes. They may be there, just hidden for now.

[Massa Charlie]

Also, if you have Norton Antivirus pre-installed on your laptop, it takes up a hell of alot of disk space. Especially if you have the full suite.

If you have Norton anything on your laptop, you need to shitcan the Norton and get something else. Norton is notorious for creating more problems than it solves — in fact, it creates problems just so it can pretend to solve them.

Anyway, it's not unusual for new harddrives to have significantly less capacity than is advertised. Even if you flatlined the drive and completely re-initialized it, you'd still find your capacity 2 or 3 GB short of advertised capacity.

However, when you're talking about gigabytes of storage, you're talking about a hell of a lot of storage, anyway, for the typical user. Somebody who's heavily into graphic, video and music applications probably needs a few terabytes of storage, but a regular user might not fill up 200 GB in a fucking year.