Where is the used memory of my hard disk?

Question

I have a COMPAQ laptop which has 37,3 gigas of hard disk space. I burn all my mp3 as well as pictures but I still have only 28% of free memory (+/-10gigas). so I downloaded Soft-Central SC-DiskInfo and I realized that my complete hard disk C: uses 19,9Gigas!!! see? I don´t know what is consuming the 7 extra gigas!! any ideas?? thank you very much

Answer 1

if i understand your question correct, then you mean Windows shows ~27GB used, while Soft-Central SC only shows ~20GB used.
kick that program on the moon and trust the Windows number. the reason is you have to distinguish between the total effective file size and the total file size needed on the disk. if you have a lot of small files on the disk then all the blocks that are only partially used must be counted as entire blocks, and i guess this won't be taken in consideration by this program. you can test this easily by right clicking on a folder and selecting properties. it will show you two different numbers - effective size and size used on disk. i have some folders on my HD where the difference is about 35%.

furthermore the disk space for the virtual memory and hibernation is hidden. i don't think this program is able to count that space.

Answer 2

Firstly, the term is gigabytes or for short just use the abbreviation GB.

Chances are it is the music or videos that you are downloading that is taking up all that space. An average song is approximately 4-8MB (there are 1000MB in 1GB).

If you want to find some of the larger files on your computer simply open up windows explorer (so...open up my computer for example) and then hit F3 on your computer. Do a search for ALL FILES AND FOLDERS for files that are say larger than 5000KB (which will be 5MB).

Make sure to change what folder you are seaching to C:\ or something else.

BE CAREFUL. If you find a bunch of files that are big do not just start randomly deleting. Make sure they aren't necessary system files. =)