Missing Memory...?

[O'nus]

So I have been cleaning my HD and found that 55 GB are unaccounted for on my C:. This is on Vista. Does the properties on C: take hidden files into account? I thought it did and this boggles my mind. Let me put it this way: - C: says 207 GB used up - I select all files on C: and check size to be 152 So.. where's the other 55..? Any ideas..? ~

[Replicon]

I think if you have a regular user account, it will not take into account the system files. I noticed this on my work XP laptop as well.

[Ynot]

probably the system restore (or shadow copy, or whatever they call it now)

[[SomeGuy]]

Or the registry and such.

[Specialis Sapientia]

I don't know where the data is, but unnessesary data are accumulating each and every day. If you have 207 GB used up this program should free some space up. http://www.ccleaner.com/download

[blade5x]

It's likely system restore, hibernation, shadow copy, etc like Ynot said. I regularly bounce around between 65-85GB free on my C: drive. If you have 207 GB used up this program should free some space up. I have 994 GB used up. But I have about a total of 1.4TB of hard drive space so I'm still fine.

[Keresztanya]

The problem could have to do with GiB and GB mislabeling. I don't recall all the specific details, but considering you have 1.4 TB, there is going to be a noticeable difference. There is also some space taken up by formatting. Here, from Wiki Since the early 2000s most consumer hard drive capacities are grouped in certain size classes measured in gigabytes. The exact capacity of a given drive is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most manufacturers of hard disk drives and flash-memory disk devices define 1 gigabyte as 1000000000bytes, the computer operating systems used by most users usually calculate size in gigabytes by dividing the total capacity in bytes (whether it is disk capacity, file size, or system RAM) by 1073741824. This distinction can be a cause of confusion, as a hard disk with a manufacturer-rated capacity of 400 gigabytes may be reported by the operating system as only 372 GB large, depending on the type of report. The JEDEC memory standards uses the IEEE 100 nomenclatures which defines a gigabyte as 1073741824bytes.[1] The difference between units based on SI and binary prefixes increases exponentially—for example, the SI kilobyte value is nearly 98% of the kibibyte, but a megabyte is under 96% of a mebibyte, and a gigabyte is just over 93% of a gibibyte value. This means that a 300 GB (279 GiB) hard disk drive can appear as 279 GB. As storage sizes increase and larger units are used, this difference becomes even more pronounced. Some legal challenges have been waged over this confusion such as a legal challenge against Western Digital.[2][3] The settlement of the legal challenge against Western Digital included directions to add a disclaimer that the usable capacity may differ from the advertised capacity.[3] Because of its physical design, computer memory is addressed in multiples of base 2, thus, memory size can always be factored by a power of two (for instance, 384 MiB = 3×227 bytes). It is thus convenient to use binary units for non-disk memory devices at the hardware level (for example, in using DIMM memory boards). Most software applications have no particular need to use or report memory in binary multiples and operating systems often use varying granularity when allocating it. Other computer measurements, like storage hardware size, data transfer rates, clock speeds, operations per second, etc., do not have an inherent base, and are usually presented in decimal units.

[Stalker]

System restore (up to 15% of drive capacity) plus swap file will account for most of that. Any remainder is just other system files and other users' files that you don't have access to. Nothing to do with GB/GiB since Windows is consistent in that area. (More on that.)

[Keresztanya]

System restore (up to 15% of drive capacity) plus swap file will account for most of that. Any remainder is just other system files and other users' files that you don't have access to. Nothing to do with GB/GiB since Windows is consistent in that area. (More on that.) Actually, when you buy a drive, it is labeled with MiB/GiB, so if you have a 1 TB drive, it's actually 1 TiB, but sold to you as 1 TB, and accounted in most OSs as less than 1 TB.