I have a Dell Deminsion PC with 4 gigs of memory in it. I have looked everywhere that I can think of to find this alleged memory but it defies me.
My windows op only takes up 1 gig and I'm not running a lot of other programs,
According to my math I'm missing about 2 and a half gigs.my brother says that he thinks the system was originally partitioned off.I don't know this is a used system
Any help in helping me with this problem would be great,because my system is so bogged down I can't even run defrag or disk clean-up

Go to start, then my computer, right click my computer, should show c: and possibly another lister drive.
Right click c: go to properties and it should show drive size and amount of used and open space. Windows operating systems make a backup copy in a partitioned area when installed, this could use a great deal of memory

Hi,
Follow the suggestion by the other volunteer, about My Computer, then Right click on the C Drive, then Left click on Properties.
It should show the amount of free space, as well as the amount of used space.
If you are using Win98/98SE; there will not necessarily be another partition, named something else. Win98 does not partition the drive for you, unless you do it yourself.
Best wishes,
fredg

I have a Dell Deminsion pc with 4 gigs of memory in it. I have looked everywhere that I can think of to find this alledged memory but it defies me.
My windows op only takes up 1 gig and I'm not running alot of other programs,
according to my math I'm missing about 2 and a half gigs.my brother says that he thinks the system was originally partitioned off.I don't know this is a used system
Any help in helping me with this problem would be great,because my system is so bogged down I can't even run defrag or disk clean-up

You aren't talking about memory but storage space. Since they are measured in the same way (bytes) they are often confused. As indicated you can right click on the drive in MY Computer, select properties and see the total and free space on your drive. If it doesn't come close to 4G then its possible you may have 2 partitions. To tell that you may need to run FDISK. It would help to know what version of windows you have to help further.

I would also suggest you go to Dell.com plug in your systems ID tag and it will tell you exactly what the system was equipped with. A 4G hard drive is pretty old.

I did what was suggested but that doesn't tell me what the space is being used for.
Scott what is and how do I run fdisk

I did what was suggested but that doesn't tell me what the space is being used for.
Scott what is and how do I run fdisk

Before we get into that you need to provide more info. I did ask for your Windows version. I'd also like to know what your research showed as the total size and free space of the drive.

As for telling you what is taking up the space, you have to look at your folders for that. You should be able to find a utility that will give you a total size of each folder that will help.

Try the treesize util on this page - it tells you the size of each folder on your disk (including subfolders) & its free!

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

I am running xp, 4.01 gb total space,230mb free space.

I am running xp, 4.01 gb total space,230mb free space.

Ok, if you are supposed to have a 4g drive then you do and its all in one partition. So you can forget the stuff about FDisk.

So your question is where is all the space going.

The first thing I would do is run a Disk Cleanup (right click on Drive in My Computer and select Properties, then press Disk Cleanup). This will get rid of all the junk.

From there you can start looking through your machine for music or video files or other data files.

4G is really too small for an XP system. XP uses about 2G. So I would be looking at adding another drive or replacing the tiny one.

Just found this article which might be of help:

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-10163_7-5555103-1.html?tag=bnav