A 250 Gb hard drive contains 250,000,000,000 bytes.  Drive manufacturers use the base 10 system and convert 250,000,000,000 bytes to 250 Gb.  Windows uses the binary system where 1 Gb = 1024 Mb, 1 Mb = 1024 Kb, and 1 kb = 1024 bytes.  Thus the empty hard drive starts with 238 Gb according to Windows.  Subract from this the partitions that Dell uses for its PCRestore and the 32 Mb utility partition, and you will start with something like 229 Gb.   Thus, you do not have a problem.  Everything is accounted for by the smoke and mirrors of hard drive manufacturer's and Windows conversions.  The drive still has 250,000,000,000 bytes no matter how you look at it.

Steve  

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@saintsam wrote:

Hi can anyone help Me?

I bought a Dell Dimension 8400 about 6 weeks ago, with it I got 250 GB hard drive. Now whenever I click on Local Disk (C: ) It shows that Total size is 229GB and I’ve got available 214GB Free memory, I don’t understand how that could be when I’ve only used 4GB with all my  documents and programs, should it not show that iv got 246GB available memory. Is that normal? Is there anyway that I can find out where the other 32GB memory is being used up and how to I rectify this problem. All suggestions and comments will be greatly appreciated.

Thank You

SaintSam

Free "memory"?  Or are you confusing hard drive space with available system memory, which is two different things.

Hard disk size discrepancies were answered by other posters.