Lossing spce on my computer

[stressfree]

When you defrag your computer, what is meant to happen? Before I did mine the other day, I had 224 Gb of space free, but after it was done, this went down to 221 Gb. Am I being an idiot and doing something wrong? This is the 3rd time it has happened. I managed to get 2 gig of it back by compressing my files, but I do not want to have to do that every time I defrag the computer.

I still have a lot of space, so it is not a major problem at the moment, but in the futre it might be a problem if I have loads of stuff on my computer.

Also, my hard drive is meant to be 320 Gb, but when I check the proerties it says I have 290 Gb available and just under 67 Gb is being used but I can only find about 18.5 Gb of stuff on the computer. I assume the difference between the 320 and 290 is being used by my back up stuff (No idea where that is kept), but I can not find the difference between the 18.5 Gb and the 67 Gb.

I did think about re-settingthe computuer to factory settings but That would mean lossing some of my updated stuff (i.e. I-tunes) and I not not want to have to do it all over again.

Any advice welcome (please keep it simple, my brain does not do computer stuff easily!).

[Thalamus.]

Hi stressfree,

welcome to Club VAIO..

The difference in hard drive size is partly due to the different way manufactures and Microsoft report the sizes..

Manufacturers use the SI scale for example 1KB = 1000 bytes

Microsoft, ie windows XP/Vista, use the binary, for example 1KB = 1024 bytes

Therefore manufactures 320 GB hard drive = 320,000,000,000 bytes.

Whereas MS 320 GB hard drive = 279 GB

example 300GB manufactures size converted to MS binary scale...

300Gb = 300,000,000,000

/1024 = 3,125,000,000 kilobytes
/1024 = 305,176 megabytes
/1024 = 298 Gigabytes

also then subtract the space allocated to the hidden recovery partition, which is probably 8 GB, leaves you 290GB..

The difference in HDD space has always been this way, only it's more noticeable now as HDD capacities have got larger..

for example a 120 GB hard drive = 111.75 GB a difference of 8.25GB whereas the difference in for your Vaio's 320GB drive is 22GB..

The remaining missing HDD space could be due to the space used by Vista's System Restore..

You can check what space is being used and allocated to shadow storage by follow this guide..

Click Start, then click All programs followed by Accessories.

In Accessories Right Click on Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.

In the Command Prompt window type: vssadmin list shadowstorage and then click Enter

Hopefully you should see..

Used Shadow Copy Storage space:

Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space:

Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: