[MagnitudinusEius]

I have an Acer Asire 3680 running Vista Home, 80GB HDD, 512MB DDR2

I'm not sure if someone switched hard drives before giving it to me but for some reason, the C drive only has 37.2 GB and the D has like 29. If this is normal, then


If not, what can I do to fix it? I heard a BIOS update might fix it up but i'm not sure how to do that

The other problem is that for some reason, it fills up very easily. I can spend an hour on it, surfing the web and .2 gigs are gone, without warning. It used to fill up even after I deleted some programs. And that's the even weirder part: my programs take up not even 2 Gigs, yet if I install something, I lose like 3 Gbs.

It's a messed up hard drive and has to be formatted now and then. Does that have anything to do with it?

[xalerik]

Maybe recovery partition take some? It would be nice to see disk management screenshot.

It can fill up because of SWAP file. 512MB very small amount for Vista (2GB recommended) Because of lack of memory, system continuosly increases virtual memory (SWAP) and uses disk space.

[MagnitudinusEius]

By disk management, you mean....

[xalerik]

Right click on Computer, select Manage in window opened you should see Disk Management section. Inside it should be graphicaly displayed your hard drive. How much space it, how partitions distributed.

[MagnitudinusEius]

Screenshot

[xalerik]

Yep, recovery partition take rest of space. In result you have about 74.5GB.
It's correct value. Why? google it


80 GB 80,000,000,000 80 GB 74.51 GB

[MagnitudinusEius]

URG
so there's no way I can actually get more space unless I get bigger drive?

[soft_ice]

Well you could re-install and use the entire Disk as one partition.

[Elvandil]

Making any changes to the partitions at all will cause you to lose the ability to run recovery. That's fine if you have recovery disks. But if not, that is the only copy of Windows that you have for your machine.

Many programs create Restore Points before installing. That can account for some of the used space.

Vista dynamically adjusts the amount of disk space to be used for restore points depending on how much space you have available.

The total of the files on the drive will never, ever equal the amount of used space on the drive. For one thing, files take more space on the drive than their sizes. There are also files and folders not accessible to most users, as well as shadow copies and restore points.

It's certainly normal for space to be used by the internet cache while browsing. but space usage changes all the time, even if you are doing nothing at all on the machine.

It's probably a good idea to get a new drive when 50% of a drive is filled, though it depends somewhat on how fast you got to 50%. You certainly need one if it is 75% filled. Space is needed for temp files and DVD images for burning and defrag requires at least 15% free space. So it's better to have a lot than a little.

Generally, however, if you have not gotten any low space warnings, you have enough to operate. But in this century, it's ridiculous to spend too much time trying to save disk space. Just get more.

You should have an external drive, anyway, so you can back up the system for when the hard drive fails. Otherwise, you will lose it all, including Windows.

[MagnitudinusEius]

that sucks
thanks for the help guys
the hard drive is perpetually damaged anyway so Im getting a bigger and new one

[Elvandil]

If it's at all usable, you can clone the old to the new if you don't want to lose everything (including Windows). Or, you can buy an external case and use it for occasional, full system backups.

The hard drive in your computer is in one of two states right now. It's
either going to fail or it already failed. Hard drives are inherently
fragile things with no built in redundancy.
-Chris Pirillo

I'm so old, I can remember when hard drives actually lasted a long time and failure was rare (maybe 10 years ago ).

But I didn't mean to be totally discouraging. There is more than one way to, um, (sorry, the cat is watching over my shoulder) to do things. (Some people think I have an unusually smart cat. But I know better. I think he may even be a Republican.)

[MagnitudinusEius]

Originally Posted by Elvandil

If it's at all usable, you can clone the old to the new if you don't want to lose everything (including Windows). Or, you can buy an external case and use it for occasional, full system backups.



I'm so old, I can remember when hard drives actually lasted a long time and failure was rare (maybe 10 years ago ).

But I didn't mean to be totally discouraging. There is more than one way to, um, (sorry, the cat is watching over my shoulder) to do things. (Some people think I have an unusually smart cat. But I know better. I think he may even be a Republican.)

I might do that but im not sure if i wanna stay with Vista or go to 7, or even XP. trusty old XP

[MagnitudinusEius]

Originally Posted by Elvandil

Making any changes to the partitions at all will cause you to lose the ability to run recovery. That's fine if you have recovery disks. But if not, that is the only copy of Windows that you have for your machine.

Many programs create Restore Points before installing. That can account for some of the used space.

Vista dynamically adjusts the amount of disk space to be used for restore points depending on how much space you have available.

The total of the files on the drive will never, ever equal the amount of used space on the drive. For one thing, files take more space on the drive than their sizes. There are also files and folders not accessible to most users, as well as shadow copies and restore points.

It's certainly normal for space to be used by the internet cache while browsing. but space usage changes all the time, even if you are doing nothing at all on the machine.

It's probably a good idea to get a new drive when 50% of a drive is filled, though it depends somewhat on how fast you got to 50%. You certainly need one if it is 75% filled. Space is needed for temp files and DVD images for burning and defrag requires at least 15% free space. So it's better to have a lot than a little.

Generally, however, if you have not gotten any low space warnings, you have enough to operate. But in this century, it's ridiculous to spend too much time trying to save disk space. Just get more.

You should have an external drive, anyway, so you can back up the system for when the hard drive fails. Otherwise, you will lose it all, including Windows.

BY recovery discs, you mean the ones to do a full system recovery in case i need to wipe the hard drive clean and start over?

Cuz i have those o.o