I have a fairly new laptop. 3 months old. It has 3G RAM , 1.6 GHz, Running Vista. It says that the total space is 139G. I have 94G free. 44G used. This is after running disk clean up. I have tried to figure out where all of my space has gone, but can't find it. Is it normal for a 3 month old laptop to use that much space? I don't have any large programs on it.

It's the hard drive that holds your information, memory is a totally different thing. But to address your concern, I believe your total Hard drive space is 139, then subtract a few GBs for the operating system, then a few more for the Vista restore point that is default on them. So that could bring it below 130 GB. Now you have other programs that are on it, like Office, which is close to a GB itself. Do you have any movies or music stored on this laptop?

Not to mention anti-virus, updates, maybe some left over installers you downloaded. Games will take up quite a bit. Something like World of Warcraft can be over 10GB. Other games can be between 1-5GB. This is of course ignoring basic games like Bejeweled, Solitaire, Hearts, etc.

44G of used space on a Vista machine is not unusual.

Maria,

There are several formats the memory can take.

The two you are affected by are RAM (Random Access Memory). These are memory chips that are either hardwired onto the systemboard or snapped into holders on the system board.

This memory is used by the Operating System (Vista) to feed information to and from the CPU. Basically, it is the holding pen for data that is needed immediately.

I suspect the 1.6 GHz is the refresh rate for the memory chips.

Hard disk storage is another area. As the name implies it is a storage device.

A raw disk begins its life by being formatted and if necessary for the disk, the Operating Systems boot-up information and its kernel are placed on the disk. A disk can also be "partitioned", which means split up into several sections with each section acting like a separate disk.

These actions will take up some space on the . Then the disc is loaded with the remainder of the operating system. Programs are added and then of course data files.