I looking into purchasing a new computer, in paticular a system that has a p4 2.oGhz chip. Every system I've looked at has XP Home version loaded on it and minimal software bundles. I've noticed that every system I looked at so far, whether it is a Compaq, Hp or Sony shows the physical hard drive to be less than what actually stated as the size of the hard drive. In example: an HP system that says it has a 100 gig drive shows the physical size of drive to be 88gig. An 80 gig drive system shows 68 gig and a system that says its 120 gig is actually 105 gig. I asked salespeople about this an I was told that when the hard drive is formatted it loses that much space. That seems to be a little wierd. I would figure that if you purchase a system that says 100 gig, you should see a 100 gig physical drive. Any explanation to this mystery?

It is a little wierd I know. But here is why: Manufacturers represetn kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes by multiples of 1000 instead of how computers do with 1024. So an 80GB drive will have 80000000000 bytes, when when the computer caculates this into GB it comes up with 74.5GB (80*10^9/1024/1024/1024). So in effect you get about 93% of what you pay for based on true megabytes. Any other space missing is because of misadvertising.

Yo, if you see like a thing on the sticker on the comp that says if it has 100 gig hard drive space, when you checked on the hard drive and it showed lower then what it said, was because windows 95/98/me/xp/ and so on, need space on the hard drive that is why when you seen that it has not have the same space as what it said in the sticker or whatever was because windows was installed in it and if windows wasnt installed in it and all the other programs, the hard drive would be for example 100 out of 100 gigs, and sorry if i didnt talk right, bye

SsXTricKy360: I don't think that's what Joe ment! your talking about FREE SPACE Joe ment Capacity space and is use for info on how the HDD is formatted, or so I was told.

Yes, it's a combination of what Mark says and the space used for partitioning and formatting.

This question comes up every now and then. You might check this previous post for further info: http://computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/91341.html Manufacturers usually don't use the unformatted capacity anymore to describe their drives. But any rounding off of figures is certainly going to be in their favor.