Wrong Hardware Status Displayed

[chaukap]

Hi,

My Z61p (9452JRU, 2GHz, 2GB Ram, 100GB HDD, 256 VRAM, Win XP pro) has been displaying wrong information about my HDD and VRAM.

In the properties of 'C' drive on my computer, it shows that i have 61.9GB used space and only 26.7GB free space. However, if I open the C drive and select all files and folders (hidden too), and look at the properties, it shows me that i am using only 25.9GB of data. I know, I do not have more that 30GB of files on my laptop. So why is the system showing my more disk space used and how can I fix it.

Also browsing through various place to see disk usage, I came across the fact that my system shows 512MB of Video RAM instead of 256.

I dont know, how to fix it. Thanks for the help

- Kaps

[dsalyers]

1) There are many reasons why the reported free space does not match.

- I don't think the size of the virtual memory file would be included when you did a directory scan. -- I could be wrong about this, though.

- There is storage used on your hard drive to indicate all of the information about the files/directories. This can be a substantial amount

- The size of the file on disk != file size. This is because you can address a single byte of data on a hard disk, only blocks.

30GB seems like a very large discrepancy, so I would make sure the windows swap file did grow extraordinarily big. Also, you may defragment your hard drive, which can help reclaim some space.



In answer to your second question. The reading of 512MB for your video card is correct. most ATI cards have what they call hypermemory. Basically the card has 256MB of memory and will use up to 256MB of system memory if it needs to. My understanding is that it does not take away from your current memory unless needed. I can't seem to find an option in the driver to disable this, maybe in the bios.

[chaukap]

Thanks for the quick response,

The solution to twice the VRAM makes sense and I am happy to understand it.

However, for the HDD space, I came across another possible reason from a forum on notebookreview.com.
The Thinkvantage - Rescue and Recovery might have created a local back on my hard disk, which can be used for full restore of not only my original factory configuration but my working files too.

When I go to the R&R, I can see a backup named 'local' which I am trying to delete but I cannot. Probably this local backup is not seen by the OS. So still need help deleting it.

[chaukap]

Finally, I got it

The problem was with Rescue and Recovery. It did create a local back up on my hard disk but would not allow me to delete anything. I upgraded Rescue and Recovery to the latest version which might be a part of the problem. In the end, I used brute force and uninstalled Rescue and Recovery. So, I am back to 58GB of free space.

- Kaps

[dsalyers]

Finally, I got it

The problem was with Rescue and Recovery. It did create a local back up on my hard disk but would not allow me to delete anything. I upgraded Rescue and Recovery to the latest version which might be a part of the problem. In the end, I used brute force and uninstalled Rescue and Recovery. So, I am back to 58GB of free space.

- Kaps

Ah, nice to know. I don't use rescue and recovery, so that didn't occur to me. Surprised that it doesn't show up as a file on your harddrive.....