Why does Vista say my harddrive is more full than it actually is?

Answer 1

Windows Vista creates system resore points every day and vista allows this to use up to 15% of your hard drive you can save a lot of space by removing all of the restore points but the most resent one will stay there you can do this through disk cleanup.

Start->Disk Cleanup->files from all users on this computer->continue->Local Disk (C:)->More Options->system restore and shadow copies ->clean up->delete->ok->delete files

hope this helps

Another option to try would be Advanced SystemCare - a free program to keep your system clean. In the Utilities area, click the Admin Tools tab, then Disk Explorer. This tool will scan your computer and list all files and their size. You can then see what files are using up large blocks of space. I found 60 GB of space taken up by videos and DVDs which I deleted to free up the space. It's a great program for both general maintenance and troubleshooting. Good luck

Answer 2

There are two main points about why your available disk space seems lower:

1. Most operating systems, including Windows, calculate space as the binary representation that 1024 bytes = 1 kilobyte. However, Many hardware manufacturers use the decimal representation (1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte). Therefore, 320GB in decimal would show as 312.5GB.
2. Your Operating System reserves some space in the hard drive, called 'System Reserved Space'. This is 100MB in Windows 7 by default, but it varies greatly.