Conflicting Reports?(Computer help Please)
 

Last night, i had my amount of free space at about 29gb out of an 76.3gb hard drive. Just 30 minutes ago i check, and and i'm down to 23gb. So i ran WinDirStat(A handy program, you should get it) and found out what was taking up space. After cutting useless files, i take note of my hard drive space statistics. Then i went into my C drive properties, lo and behold, they're telling me different things:

WinDirStat
Used Space: 28.1gb
Free Space: 48.2gb

C Drive Properties
Used Space: 45.0gb
Free Space: 31.3gb

So who's lying? Is WinDirStat a buggy program telling me things that are untrue? Or is WinDirStat telling me the truth and i'm missing 16.9gb of space? If the latter, how would i go about getting that space back?

Windows reserves a certain amount of harddrive space for it's own purposes, and only frees it up when it absolutely has to. It's still there, it's just earmarked by the system.

I knew that, but 17gb seems like alot for a function like that. That's why i thought it was a problem.

This is neither Cheese nor Pants nor Comedy Gold. As such, General is now its home.

I would suggest Powerquest Partition Magic to solve your HD issues.

Clean up your lost chains, too. Depending on how much you've changed on there, there could be a lot of them. Not 17 GB worth, most likely, but still some.

How exactly would you do those?

Chains aren't a part of the Windows System, it's a Macintosh function, or so I think. System restore wasn't introduced as a physical CP until Windows XP. Win2000 uses actual files, and WinXP uses wuite literally "magic" as it uses no files.

System Restore can be found in Accessories > System Tools. I don't know about chains, because I have WinXP SP2, and it doesn't have chains.