Hard drive space mysteries

i recently got an advent computer (7204) and i'm noticing something quite bizarre going on with the hard drive space. it is labelled as having 100 GB even on the actual laptop itself, and yet my C: has 87.7 GB; even accounting for non-binary bytes (KiB, and so on) that wouldn't make up the space difference. it also says that i have something like 58 GB free, when there's no way that i've used that much - even highlighting all files and folders under C: and viewing properties shows that the space isn't that used up from the files alone.

as far as i can tell, there's no extra partition for recovery purposes.

what gives?

The size the operating system lists the HDD at is roughly 93% of the size it was sold to you as. This is due to a difference in definitions of GB and the such.

System files and the recycle bin will cause more space to be used, but will not change the capacity of the drive.

Run the disk management portion of the administrative tools, and tell us if that drive is maximally partitioned.

If you're running vista, turn off indexing and system restore

In other words:

Start | Settings | Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Computer Management | Storage | Disk Management

turns out there's a 5.37 GB EISA(?) partition, making it 93.16 GB

I believe EISA partitions are used by the manufacturer to store restore files.

>>6
Yes, >>7 is giving you the right advice.  Don't touch that 5.37GB partition; it's all too likely to contain your OS source (basically, a dump of the Windows XP CD, plus other goodies).

With partitioning, formatting, and the source partition, you ended up with about 88GB of the 100GB.  Right?