help? just bought new laptop...

[Rhysenn]

ok, so I'm going to sound completely stupid by asking this, but I need some answers.
Let me start by saying I know little more than the bare minimum about computers, so please bare with me.

Anyway, I recently bought an Acer 8930 laptop off the internet and it was boasting a 320GB hard drive. but I open up the "my computer" file it says my C drive only has 144 GB of space. Also included in this folder is a D drive also containing 144 GB of space, an HD DVD-ROM drive E, and a BD-ROM drive F.

It says on the Acer label on the bottom right corner of m laptop that it should indeed have 320 GB, so, my question is, where is it?

Can anyone help me out here?

 

[thermophilis]

You have one hard drive that's split in to two sections, or partitions. It's basically to make file management easier, like on my laptop I store all my games in the D: drive and everything else in the main C: drive, that way I instantly know where the game I'm looking for is and I don't have to click through several folders to get to it.

C: and D: drives added together is 288gb of space, so you wondering where the rest is. If you are running vista that could be the problem, vista is a massive file and takes up a lot of space for things like the recycle bin, emergency space and most importantly the whole operating System. The rest of your space might be there it is just taken up by vista's massive file size, the reason it says its not there is because vista is considered "safer" and it hides most of the system files, so they do not show that they take up space. Or it could be that you have been ripped off.

Actually it comes down to how you measure your bytes. The computer counts bytes in binary, 1024 bytes in a kilobyte 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte and so on. However the advertisers usually round down to 1000, counting in this way the drive will appear to have more space than its actual capacity.

 

[Rhysenn]

You have one hard drive that's split in to two sections, or partitions. It's basically to make file management easier, like on my laptop I store all my games in the D: drive and everything else in the main C: drive, that way I instantly know where the game I'm looking for is and I don't have to click through several folders to get to it.

Actually it comes down to how you measure your bytes. The computer counts bytes in binary, 1024 bytes in a kilobyte 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte and so on. However the advertisers usually round down to 1000, counting in this way the drive will appear to have more space than its actual capacity.

I thought it might be something like that.
But then how do I install something onto my D: drive?
do I just select it when I'm asked where to download something?
Cause I tried that and it didn't seem to take up any space on the drive. Though it could be due to the fact that the file was less than 1 GB in size.

 

[thermophilis]

When you install something just change the install directory to wherever on the D: drive you want to install it, like when I install games it's D:\Games\Whatever the game is.