I just brought it home at about 5:00 this evening and finally got around to getting the old one completely disassembled and the new one completely up and on the desk, new monitor, speakers, key board, mouse, the works. I go to messing around and ran into some memory issues and discovered it only has 8.18GB of free space out of 148. Is that not crazy. I guess I will spending the next 3 hours of the wee morning hours packing it all back in the box. Any computer geeks want to help explain this one or is it just a complete flub. I cant find where all this disk space has gone. Technology just befuzzes me sometimes.

What was the size of the drive supposed to be?
Some computer companies partition the drive to create 2 drives out of one. One for the OS and preinstalled programs or backup and one for the rest.

You might be looking in to the smaller partition. If that is the case, it might explain where the rest of the drive storage went.

What OS are you using?

In vista and I believe in XP as well, right click on “computer” and then “manage” and “storage/disk management”. it will give you information about your drive and its partitions if any.

You can also run this free util to get rid of some unneeded crap and uninstall the bloatware and crapware that came with your computer.
http://www.ccleaner.com/