The Glade 4.0

Ok this is a small problem that's been bugging me for awhile with my laptop. It's an older model Dell XPS M1530 purchased in Oct. 2008, and as such has a smaller harddrive, like 140GB or something. Vista lists available size as 136GB. I purchased an external for my music, videos, etc, stuff I didn't to keep on the hard drive itself. However whats been bugging me is with only Vista, the usual programs, WoW and Fallout 3 installed I'm at near 50% usage already. In the photo below, the right-hand window is me totaling up all the folders on C: (I turned on hidden files and folders). It's not crazy important or anything, but I wouldn't mind having that extra 14GB around for some flexibility. I just the other day did a Disk Cleaning as well as a Defrag, so I guess everything should be in order. Anything I can do or is that just Windows doing its thing with disk sizes and such?

You are merely running afoul of the difference between decimal and binary math.

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So it's just me being silly....thought so

Thanks!

And also the fact that file size and size on disk aren't the same, either -- particularly if you've got a bunch of small files.

A file will use one or more clusters (a unit of disk addressing) to store its data; any partially full clusters are partially full for the purposes of some size reporting, but make the full cluster occupied (causing size on disk to nearly always be larger than the actual file size). Over thousands of small files, this can add up to noticeable discrepencies.

But yeah, decimal and binary math is the primary factor here.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades