About free antiviruses, AVG is good, but AntiVir is considered better. Just a thought.
And yeah about the hard drive thing, it’s not a matter of “unlocking” some sort of hidden space on your hard drive. A 500 gb hard drive should show up as around 466 gb. That’s just all there is to it. It’s not a rip-off, although it is needlessly confusing.
Windows (and most other operating systems) views a kilobyte as 1,024 bytes, not simply 1,000 bytes. So as you go from byte, to kilobyte, to megabyte, to gigabyte, you’re “losing” a lot of numbers. One gigabyte is viewed in Windows as 1,073,741,824 because it’s a base 2 counting system. We count in base 10, so a gig to us humans is simply a billion bytes. This is why as you increase in hard drive size, the more space you seem to “lose.”
If in doubt, go to your My Computer, right click one of the drives, and click Properties. You’ll notice the capacity in bytes is noticably larger than the simple GB amount to the right of it.
My 430gb D drive is actually 462,422,011,904 bytes. But it says 430gb, not 462gb as we’d humanly call it.
EDIT: Oh, and the obvious question to ask next is, “Well why don’t the stupid hard drive manufacturers count in base 2?” Because they are actually counting in base 10, as we would, and as some operating systems actually do too. I’m not sure WHICH operating systems do that, and I don’t see why it matters since 99% of everything is Windows. But meh.
