in search of more hard drive space

[kimba1]

I just got a laptop with a 120g hard drive
I started with 98g of space the rest used form a partitioned restore system so they don`t have to give me a recovery disk disk.
after awhile i noticed alot of hard drive space to getting eaten up
I googled and learned to throtle back the restore to 5%
but it didn`t go into detail about swap files
I still got over 20 g unaccounted
can any body help or am I gonna have to bite the hard drive loss
what the deal about swapfiles?

[Amianthus]

Swap files are used to swap memory pages in and out of memory. It increases the amount of memory available to programs over your physical memory by "faking" requested memory allocations with disk space.

Your "missing" disk space is because of the calculations. Disk drive manufacturers advertise a drive that contains 120,000,000,000 bytes as 120 GB. Windows (along with just about everyone else) counts that as 111 GB and change. On my computer, the recovery partition is a tad over 10 GB, leaving 99.something GB for available space on the main drive.