Windows XP Partition is Odd

[DanL]

In the picture you showed us, you didn't have Show Hidden Files turned on. If you did, there would be two hidden folders: "System Volume Information" and "RECYCLER." The former is NTFS stuff and if you ever try to get into it, it will always say "Access Denied" (saftey feature so no one but the machine can edit it) The latter is your recycle bin. There would also have been many more hidden system files - Autoexec.bat, boot.ini, config.sys just to name a few. Turn on Show Hidden Files and try it again.

I looked at the discrepencies on my hd between hidden files on and hidden files off, and I had about a gig discrepency. But then again, my C partition is only 5 gigs (I set it up this way so the only thing on my C drive is windows so that once it comes to reformat, I only have to reformat the C drive and the rest of my data is left in tact).

Although I really doubt it is this simple of a linear relationship, if I have a 1 gig hidden-vs-non-hidden discrepency on a 5 gig partition, if you were to use the same percentage on at 60 gig partition, that would be a 12 gig discrepency. Again, I doubt it's this simple, but it is a pretty close coincidence.

I think Hidden Files are your main problem - on my C drive, right clicking everything and comparing that number to the general "Free Space" is pretty close. It's not exact, but thats because Windows has some Special Files it doesn't exactly tally up like normal files. Aside from turning on Hidden Files, you need to look into Virtual Memory and Indexing. Virtual Memory (or Paging Files) is hard drive space that Windows uses as RAM. By default, Windows grabs however much it thinks it needs, and this changes from session to session (you check this by Control Panel > System Properties > Advanced > Performance: Settings > Advanced > Virtual Memory). The file is called pagefile.sys, and it's hidden. This can be quite large (mine's about .8 gigs). Indexing is a service that allows you to search for files on your harddrive faster, but this works by building a database of all the files on your harddrive, and so, this takes up memory. From the screenshots, I can see that you have this enabled (C: Drive > Right Click > Properties > at bottom of screen). I'm not sure exactly how much memory this takes up, but you've got almost 100,000 files and 10,000 folders, so I'm sure this database isn't small.

Hope this helps