Hard Disk Problem

[The_Showstopper]

I got a new Laptop last Thursday, a Dell with supposedly 250GB Hard Drive and 3GB Ram. The 3GB Ram is there but my HD is only 222GB.

Anyway, since then it seems as if by the day my Hard Disk is dwindling in space. On the Friday I noticed that I only had 200GB. but I put this down to downloading updates and general maintenence. Since then however, the only programs that I have downloaded are Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Norton, my Printer and about 6GB of Music and Film. Yet today my HD stood at 172GB!

What may be connected with this however is that I tried to download Microsoft Office from this site and I couldn't install it. Coupled with that every time I connect to the Internet, I have to turn my Phishing protection back on on Norton. I've also downloaded the Beta Internet Explorer 8, could this have affected the performance as it all seems to have gone tits up around then.

I am in the process of doing a Disk Defrag, and from being 172GB, it has gone down to 169GB, note that I have not downloaded ANYTHING.

All in all the Laptop is fine, very quick and all is good, however this rapid loss of HD space is starting to worry me. Should I wait another week or two to see if it keeps going down or am I worrying about it a bit too much? What should I do?

Thanks for your help.

 

[Cromewell]

I wouldn't worry about it. You can run disk cleanup if you want to try and get some space back. Also a good sized chunk is probably system restore points.

 

[Pck21]

I got a new Laptop last Thursday, a Dell with supposedly 250GB Hard Drive and 3GB Ram. The 3GB Ram is there but my HD is only 222GB.

Anyway, since then it seems as if by the day my Hard Disk is dwindling in space. On the Friday I noticed that I only had 200GB. but I put this down to downloading updates and general maintenence. Since then however, the only programs that I have downloaded are Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Norton, my Printer and about 6GB of Music and Film. Yet today my HD stood at 172GB!

What may be connected with this however is that I tried to download Microsoft Office from this site and I couldn't install it. Coupled with that every time I connect to the Internet, I have to turn my Phishing protection back on on Norton. I've also downloaded the Beta Internet Explorer 8, could this have affected the performance as it all seems to have gone tits up around then.

I am in the process of doing a Disk Defrag, and from being 172GB, it has gone down to 169GB, note that I have not downloaded ANYTHING.

All in all the Laptop is fine, very quick and all is good, however this rapid loss of HD space is starting to worry me. Should I wait another week or two to see if it keeps going down or am I worrying about it a bit too much? What should I do?

Thanks for your help.

Well there's your problem ^

You're too busy worrying about tits all day that you're computer has decided to download porn on your behalf. That stuff can get messy after a while

I'm kidding. I wouldn't worry too much about it. No hard drive comes completely with ALL the space that it says. 500GB hard drives are lucky to have 430GBs on them before you do ANYTHING to them. You probably have things like updates and other smaller programs that are on there that add up big time. If you're really concerned, my only suggestion would be to buy a bigger hard drive unfortunately.

 

[Cromewell]

500GB hard drives are lucky to have 430GBs on them before you do ANYTHING to them.

A 500GB drive should have 465GB of space after formatting. Hard drive manufacturers say a GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes, Windows says it is 1,073,741,824 bytes.

 

[PC eye]

A 500gb decimal unit of measurement is seen in product descriptions while Windows uses the binary type. Following the preinstalled OS's partitioning and formatting seen by Dell and how Windows reads drives you have to take into account the hidden recovery partition for restoring everything back to the factory state.

Norton is simply put a "Bloated resource hog" and will chew up excess drive space while not offering the protection seen by other smaller even free programs like AVG. The common advice is "dump it!" often heard enough times.

That along with Skype, your printer software plus downloads will use up space as well. The more you add the less space you are going to see. Larger softwares will easily chew up drive space rather fast.