Unless you turned System Protection off, the space discrepancy you're still seeing is due to the space used by the restore points, which can use many gigabytes (depending on how much software you have installed/updated). They are stored in "C:\System Volume Information" which is a locked folder, so that space doesn't get counted when you select the folders. Open the System Control Panel applet (shortcut: press [Windows]+[Pause/Break]), click
System protection in the sidebar on the left, and double-click your C: drive. Here you can choose to reduce its space usage (1 GB is good), or delete all the restore points. Upon clearing out most/all of the restore points, your HDD/folder sizes should be much closer to the same.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mephobia
I just noticed now that the numbers on the screenshot in the first post doesn't make sense to me. If you only look at the Local Disk C: Properties. It says used space is 176 415 932 416 bytes, which they round to 164GB. Free space: 79,4 GB -> 73.9 GB. Capacity: 255.8GB -> 238GB. Why does it say two different numbers in the same window?
Because someone at Microsoft thought it would be a great idea to calculate the numbers using binary math, forgetting that humans use a decimal numbering system. Later on (back in 1998), the
IEC officially standardized that KB, MB, GB, and TB are to be divided by 1000s, not 1024s. Rather than publicly admit their fault and correct the file size calculations (as Apple finally did in 2009), Microsoft decided to keep their silly and non-logical numbering system even till now. If you want to read more on the subject,
here is a good article (along with a calculator), written by Dr. Alexander Thomas.
Basically, compare the same sets of "space used" with the combined size of all the selected folders for an objective comparison. Since both sets of formatted sizes should be close, they will both be divided the same way, so there will be no "hidden space" contributing to the discrepancy between the HDD's used space and the folders' added up space.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mephobia
What do you think about moving the swap file to another drive or should it be on the same drive as the one windows is installed on?
- If your system has a SSD, or SSD and HDD(s), by all means leave the pagefile on the SSD.
- If your system has multiple SSDs, put the pagefile on any SSD other than C:\.
- If your system has a single HDD (partitioned or not), always leave the pagefile on C:\ to reduce seeking.
- If your system has multiple HDDs, put the pagefile on the first partition of your fastest HDD other than C:\.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mephobia
How do I check for errors? Yea, emptied the recycle bin beforehand ^^
In Windows Explorer, right-click your C:\ drive, click
Properties, go to the
Tools tab, click [Check now...]. Make sure that
Automatically fix file system errors is ticked, and
Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors in unticked, and then click [Start]. You will have to reboot your computer to actually perform the scan.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Mephobia
It went from 74GB free to 122GB free when I turned hibernate off. What does this do exactly?
For that so save so much space, you must have 64 GB of RAM in your system. Think of hibernation as standby with a save-feature, that turns your computer completely off after the save is complete (instead of leaving the RAM powered on as standby does). As such, it requires a large amount of space proportional to the capacity of your RAM to be able to save your RAM data to when entering hibernation. Most people will never use this feature except on laptops, when the battery runs out and the computer enters hibernation automatically to keep data from being lost.
You can manually enter hibernation (if enabled) by clicking the little arrow by the [Start] -> [Shut down] button, and clicking
Hibernate. Also, if you have enough space, you can enable/disable hibernation any time. Since you have so much RAM, you could save a similar amount of space again by disabling or shrinking your pagefile (as discussed earlier).