[SOLVED] Vista Free Space doesn't make sense

[link470]

I've got a Vista Business laptop I'm working on speeding up for a friend of mine. She downloads music [not too much, a good 8GB worth in total], and shes got a 103GB HD. It's actually 120 but you all know how formatting works out and hidden partitions for recovery. It's an IBM Lenovo. However, in Computer, it shows the drive as about 16GB free of 103GB. She has pretty much no programs on there, and has a few songs. It's not a virus, and I've ran programs like WinDirStat to find the hidden files etc. on her system and where larger files may be hiding. WinDirStat with all system files, and hidden files shown, say her drive contains 34GB worth of data. In theory, she should have around 60GB free. I don't have a clue where that is. I ran other software to find files on there, and heck, even just enabled "show hidden files and folders" and "show system files" and control+all properties on everything in her drive, those all equal 34GB as well. I ran a chkdsk on her file system to get her indexes straight, and still shows up as 34GB, but 16GB free.

 

Notes:

-Hibernation is turned on and is 3.3GB in size [included in the total 34GB]

 

-Pagefile is the same size and is also included in the 34GB total

 

-Machine has a 2.00GHz dual core Intel Centrino based processor, and has 3GB of RAM

 

-This morning when I checked [after working on it last night and discovering 16GB free], there was magically 26GB free. An extra 10GB gained from who knows where. I never touched the machine during the night, and it never went to sleep or hibernated.

 

Anyone face this problem or know a solution? Thanks!

Edited July 11, 2008 by link470

[powdarrmonkey]

My HP laptop reports all the spaces correctly...how big is the partition? Is it only a small bit of the drive?

[link470]

My HP laptop reports all the spaces correctly...how big is the partition? Is it only a small bit of the drive?

 

Image recovery drive is 10GB or so, and the main partition is 103GB [out of 120]

[link470]

Just to let you all know, the IBM Lenovo software was making encrypted backups on the drive, and it didn't show within windows or anywhere else. More like a rootkit backup But I found it just using the IBM backup software and deleted it. Just thought I'd post that in case anyone else ever had this problem with IBM Lenovo laptops.

[powdarrmonkey]

Worth bearing in mind, cheers