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"Hard Drive Space Discrepancy"

The properties for my hard drive (1.2 GBs) indicate that I have about 200 MBs of space left, yet when I add up the amount of space all the folders take up in this drive, I come up with 750 MBs, which is a discrepancy of 250 MBs.  What happened?
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larbel

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Larbel,

Thanks for answering so promptly!

I had no idea that manufacturers did this; it's pretty sleazy.  
I guess I will have to get some disk compression software soon.  Any idea which is better? "Stacker" or "Drivespace 3 or higher?"

Regards,

Plago
I thought I was cheated when I first got my 4.3Gb and agrued with the reseller. :>  Anyway, my suggestion is don't use Drivespace3.  Although it might seem fine at first, but eventually, it will lead to disk error and many unexpected results.  Not to mention some problem will not install to a compressed drive.

You can try to free up some space by deleting unwanted apps. and *.tmp files.  200Mb is very low and might cause you out of memory error, since you swap file often need more that 200Mb.
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ASKER

Larbel,

Thanks again for the info.  Do you think I should buy a larger hard drive instead of compression software?

Plago
Yes!  HDD are at very reasonable prices, I really suggest you to buy another instead of compressing it.
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ASKER

Thanks for your help.
Hard Disk drive manufacturers are very liberal at hard disk drive sizes.  Plus, a lot depends on how you partitioned the hard disk drive in the beginning.  In most situations you can generally get a shade more out of your hard disk drive by having multiple partitions rather than one large partition.  Generally you can expect a 1.2GB hard disk drive to only be 1GB.  However, I have seen some extreme cases where a 1.2GB hard disk drive was only a 850MB disk drive.   A lot depends on how many errors and bad spots your hard disk drive has on it too.  This is something the OEM reseller never knows until he actually sets up the hard disk drive.   Hard disk drives are so cheap these days, if you can afford it I would go with an additional hard disk drive rather than compressing your existing hard disk drive.  
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ASKER

Mr. Keen,

Thank you for your reply, which was very helpful.  I'm sorry I took so long to get back to you, but I was away due to a family illness; I normally answer my e-mail promptly.