I've bought a new desktop running Vista Home Premium. After copying files from the old computer and installing and setting up the programs I need, which add up to about 120GB, I find almost 200GB of the 500GB hard drive has been used.
David Menarry
The hard drive industry uses "decimal bits" (powers of 10) because that gives a bigger number than the "real bits" (powers of 2) used by software. Your 500GB hard drive is seen by software as around 466GB. The hardware manufacturer has probably taken a chunk for a "restore partition" so that you can easily reinstall the operating system. Microsoft has probably taken some for System Restore and a Shadow Copy. And programs always occupy more hard drive space than they appear to need because each file must occupy at least one sector.
Go to the Control Panel's Administrative Tools section and run the Disk Management program. A check that includes hidden files and folders, including operating system folders, should give you a better idea of whether any drive space is actually missing.
