Hard drive space used unaccounted for

  • Thread starter Thread starter Danny Kewl
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Danny Kewl

Hi, I have a laptop I'm looking at for my niece that has Vista
Business edition, with SP 2 I believe. The laptop is a school issue
Tangent brand. It has a 120 GB hard drive, and it says about 60 GB is
used. I can as a "guesstimate" account for maybe 10 GB or so for
system files, and applications that are installed. However, her
Documents folder is bare except for the sample files that came with
the PC. I even did a search for large files over about 100 MB, and
come up with not much that can be using that memory. I did separate
searches for common image files, video files, document files, and
found most to be images in apps like small gifs and pngs, and sorting
by size shows nothing substantial in size or number of files. I only
see one user account. What else can I look for or suspect? Thanks
much.
 
Hi, I have a laptop I'm looking at for my niece that has Vista
Business edition, with SP 2 I believe. The laptop is a school issue
Tangent brand. It has a 120 GB hard drive, and it says about 60 GB is
used. I can as a "guesstimate" account for maybe 10 GB or so for
system files, and applications that are installed. However, her
Documents folder is bare except for the sample files that came with
the PC. I even did a search for large files over about 100 MB, and
come up with not much that can be using that memory. I did separate
searches for common image files, video files, document files, and
found most to be images in apps like small gifs and pngs, and sorting
by size shows nothing substantial in size or number of files. I only
see one user account. What else can I look for or suspect? Thanks
much.
Click to expand...

Download WinDirStat. It's free and it makes a graphical representation
of all folders and files. Things will become obvious, in my opinion.

http://windirstat.info/

It might be that there is a hidden partition that uses some of the
missing space. Look for that in Disk Management.
 
From: "Danny Kewl said:
Hi, I have a laptop I'm looking at for my niece that has Vista
Business edition, with SP 2 I believe. The laptop is a school issue
Tangent brand. It has a 120 GB hard drive, and it says about 60 GB is
used. I can as a "guesstimate" account for maybe 10 GB or so for
system files, and applications that are installed. However, her
Documents folder is bare except for the sample files that came with
the PC. I even did a search for large files over about 100 MB, and
come up with not much that can be using that memory. I did separate
searches for common image files, video files, document files, and
found most to be images in apps like small gifs and pngs, and sorting
by size shows nothing substantial in size or number of files. I only
see one user account. What else can I look for or suspect? Thanks
much.
Click to expand...


You have to look at the all the file and folders of;
c:\windows
c:\program files
c:\users

to get a better guage at usage.

Right-Click on each and choose "properties" are record each appox. usage then sum up for
those three root folders and post the new results.

I consider mine average and I have
c:\users - 6.25GB (with really only 1 user)
c:\program files - 5.1GB
c:\windows - 20GB

That's appox. 31.35GB and not all the folders have been tested.

Totally, my system uses 87GB.

I think a total consumption of 60GB used on a WinVista system sounds pretty normal..

If thinks if get worse one could always buy a new (and faster 7200rpm drive) SATA hard
disk such as a 250GB or 320GB and clone the 120GB hard disk to the replacement. Then
instead of 60GB being free there will me more like 180GB or 260GB of fre space. And if
you upgrade from a slower 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm drive its will also be a little
quicker.
 
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