13 gigs missing

i recently purchased a dell laptop with a 100 gig hard drive. only 87 is available for use. i know that you never have access to all of your hard drive real estate, but 13 gigs seems a bit excessive. an ideas?

Hi, It's always annoying when you seem to get less than your bargained for and on the face of it 13GB does seem a big hit to take. The hard drive manufacturers "put their best foot forward" when describing the size of the hard drive and ignore binary completely so this in effect together with the usual overhead, formatting etc. accounts for quite a bit of the "loss." Dell computers often ship with a partition on the hard drive (often hidden) or sometimes called "restore" that contains sufficient data to enable your computer to be restored to its factory delivered condition, should you hit serious trouble that cannot be resolved through usual means. The maths goes something like this: One Gigabyte (1 GB) means 10 raised to the power9 = 1,000,000,000 bytes using powers of 10. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1 GB = 2 raised to power30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. Taking these factors into account means that the total hit of 13GB is probably about right, but if you are not convinced you can always seek further explanation from the retailer/distributor/manufacturer. Enjoy your new machine. Regards paws