lost some free space after reinstall of windows xp

i had to reinstall windows xp home with a new copy as what was in the computer had a volume license key as it belonged to a school. i was advised to reinstall a fresh new copy of windows so that if i had a problem a tech could work on it because the proper codes would be there plus im now listed as the owner instead of it just saying owner. when i bought the computer i had 83% free space on drive c. after reinstalling windows i have only 77% free space. i thought a clean install was supposed to restore back to brand new conditions. where did i lose 6% free space? my computer is working fine after the install but im just curious as to how i can get it back to 83%. when i had it at 83 percent i had my printer, aol, ie7, adobe reader, adaware, avg free, and java runtime 5.0 update 10. its a used reconditioned dell optiplex gx240 with no cds at all except the one i bought with windows xp home sp2. any info as to what happened to my free space will be appreciated. i am confused.

 

Perhaps you installed a version later than the original. MS has a way of bloating things and SP2 is naturally bigger than SP1. A percentage of drive usage is not very meaningful unless you give the total drive size. There are so many variables that something as simple as the paging file size may be what you are seeing. That can be an elective factor and there are others such as Windows components that are default versus what you would have in a sleek minimal install.

If it works, look forward and not back.

HTH

 

re lost some free space after reinstall of windows xp

both windows xp home were xp home edition sp2 version 2002. but i think i know where the 6% went. when i got the computer the more i think about it, it had hardly any critical updates from microsoft windows in it. as soon as i got it up and reinstalled again i had to install 66+ critical updates. does that sound plausible to you? thats the only thing i can think of that would be using the space as everything else i reinstalled was in there after i got it up and running the first time. if its the updates taking up the space then the mystery is solved for me as i must of installed it right as its fine so far. the only small problem i had was 3 days after i thought i was ok i turned on our computers and on aol there was no connection enabled sign plus my netgear had a red x through it and i had no internet connection. so i put in my driver for roadrunner and it had an red x for the connection and it said it was resetting or restoring the isp address. it did it i saw a green x connection restored and all is fine now so far. if you know of something else that is giving me less space let me know. thanks for jogging my memory. ps the total drive space on c is 37.24gb i still have something like 28.95gb of free space and it says 77% free.

 

I agree with surferdude; you don't have a problem. There's plenty of disk space and it's likely just the difference between the version dates and the updates, although that's a lot of space for updates. You may be missing some hardware drivers (video, sound) and if so you can find them on the mfg.'s web site.

 

You may want to consider downloading and running Doug Knox's Hotfix Backup Remover Tool. That's a zip file so unzip it to some folder and run the executable. Nice tool for trimming some bloat from your system.

 

re lost some free space after reinstall of windows xp

well all of my drivers are ok. i have video and sound. i did clean up the system restore feature on disk cleanup to the most recent one and i took a program out for my printer in the add/remove section that i didnt need ( it was for faxing which wont work since i dont have dialup) and now i have 79% free space. so now i only lost 4% which isnt bad i guess. the program for faxing used 236.00 mb of space which i thought was excessive as aol only uses 110.00mb. so i guess the mystery is solved for now. thanks for all of the suggestions.