Hi. I observed that the space available on my machine was disappearig so I turned of the system restore, some space got available again, but not the whole missing amount. I backed-up my files and ran a recovery using the recovery diks which came with the machine. Well, I can get the 37.2GB available space instead of the 40GB advertised, but right from the start there are only 34.4GB, but the amount of files on the disk is only 1.45GB. Where is the rest of it? I did, defrag, chdsk (no errors), did the recovery again... What is the problem?

Your HDD is formatted in clusters, or blocks, any one file can occupy one or many of these blocks, butttttttt, if you have a small file, say 1Kb in size, it will use up the whole cluster or say the whole 4Kb of space, no other file can occupy that "remaining" space of that particular cluster, so now if you have a lot of small files on your puter, for example, 100 icons which are 1Kb in size each, and your cluster size on your HDD for example is 4Kb in size, then those 100 icons will in fact take up 400Kb of space, hope this expaines it 4 U...

I questioned the company I purchsed my laptop from, they became rather rude with me(aside from the point), and stated that "small"(i dont see 3 gigs as small) discrepancies are caused by windows using 1,024mb for 1 gb and the vendor using 1,000mb for 1 gb( to sell it). I had a "30gb" hdd, which showed up in windows as 27.9...

That sounds about right.....Just think of it this way, say you have a folder [from your filing cabinet] that has alot of documents [paper] in it. Now if you could just pour all of that text from those documents off the paper and into the folder, you would save alot of space, but of course nothing would be organized. So if you consider the paper as the "formatting of the HDD", it is a way of organizing the data on your HDD, you loose alittle space, but everything is nice and neat...

the answer the comp maker gave is the right 1 a true meg is 1024 but hdd makers call 1000 a meg if you do the math, it checks out

I think u'r laptop companies tech support sux u shd sue those rude b---tards. P.S. i am a lawyer.

The XP OS itself takes 1.5Gb Sometimes Vendors put a compressed backup copy of Windows on a hidden partition somewhere - this is activated if you use the 'Recovery Disk' Don't know if this is relevant in your case Lesley