Vista - Unaccounted for hard drive space

Hi, I am running Vista Ultimate 64 with 4Gb RAM and have noticed that I am missing hard disk space!

My C drive is 500Gb, it formats to 465Gb, I have 195Gb worth of files on it (C root, highlight all folders, right click properties)
A further 4Gb is used for the hibernation function.
Another 4Gb is for the pagefile. (System set)
That totals to 203Gb so I should have 262Gb free on my hard drive, however, apparently, from My Computer it says I have 197Gb free, what is using the 65Gb that is missing? That is a lot of space to just be used for nothing.

My other three 500Gb drives (all 4 are the same make and model) fully add up, give or take a Gb, but that's to be expected. They only store music, recorded TV, etc...

I am guessing it is something Windows is doing, is there something that I am not aware of using the space and is not included in Windows Explorer so the size is not counted? I use Media Centre to watch and record TV heavily, but that is set to use a different drive.

Thanks in advance.

Windows is not the problem...sort of. You will never see the amount of your HD displayed as it is on the box. On the bright side you "do" have the full amount of your HD avalible to you. We see a Gig as 1 Billion. To state this simply as possible Windows sees a Gig as roughly 1.1 billion.

My 320Gb Seagates read as 298Gb. My 250 as 232, my 200 as 186 and my 160s as 149.

All your space is there. You just have bigger Gigsbytes then you would expect.

You can ignore it and relax. Its all there.

I know all that (I am studying Computer Science for my degree and do that sort of thing everyday!!)

It is more 1024 Mb to 1Gb in storage terms but never mind!!! And yes, I do know about formatting hard drives, it is one of the things that I hate most when people reply to on line shops saying that they are not getting the amount they paid for!


Anyway, I have been looking around a bit more and did a disk cleanup, I went to cleanup all but the latest system restore and it completed straight away, as in it didn't lock up the window for a while like it normally does. So I went to system restore and chose to select one, there were loads there, so disk cleanup is not cleaning up my restore points when I tell it to. I disabled system restore and re enabled it which removes them all, I have gained back 64 out of the 65Gb which is perfectly fine for me.

Problem solved!