I recently bought a new laptop with a 60 gigabyte hard disk. I installed Microsoft Office (with Outlook, Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint) and the new Adobe Creative Suite, and have only 2GB left. Richard Calvert-Smith
A simple way to find out where your space has gone is to run Sean Werkema's freeware program, SpaceMonger. Alternatives are listed In the Google Directory and Nonags.
On my notebook PC, Windows XP takes up about 2GB for files plus a swap file (pagefile.sys) and a hibernation file (hiberfil.sys). Microsoft Office takes up about 300MB and typical Adobe programs about 100MB each. Adobe reckons Creative Suite 2 Standard needs 7GB. Since a "60GB" drive is really a 57GB drive, that leaves about 47GB not accounted for.
Update: Tony Meacock reminds me that I previously recommended (SequoiaView). Like SpaceMonger, this also uses treemaps, but as Tony says, "it has a more elegant display".
