Hello, me and my girlfriend recently purchased a home computer from lxdirect.com. The computer advertised said it had a 160gig hard drive, however once it was delivered and set up last night i noticed that it only has a 145gig hard drive. So i phoned them up and they said the best that they could do was knock £29. off the price, so instead of costing me £529. it would only cost £500. I told them i would get back to them, and came on here straight away in the hope of getting some advice. I need to know just where i stand, and how much of a leg do i have to stand on, is £29. a reasonable offer??

Please help me, all advice would be appreciated.

Thank you

Danboy775

Im not sure, but if i was you, I would be sending it back, or asking for £100 quid knocked off, Cmon what £29 in todays terms? Yes its not a huge downgrade, but they shouldnt have advertised it incorrectly. Is there a similar PC with the 145gig you can compare to?

Hang on, hang on!

It is quite usual (although I agree it's a very grey area) for a hard drive not to have the full "fillable" space.

I have 2 external HD: 1 x 160 GB, total size = 149 GB, 1 x 320 GB, total size = 298 GB. My PC itself is supposed to be 160 GB, but it has 146 GB of "usable" space. The rest of the space is taken up by drivers and such.

I quite agree that it's misleading to non-computer people, but I don't think there's much you can do, just count yourself lucky you got someone who obviously knew even less about computers than you, lol, and grab the £29!

There are differences in marketing and real definitions of space for storage devices.

Manufacturers like to use metric values 10^3 (1000) whereas the actual binary definitions used by operating systems take 2^10 (1024). Your drive is likely to be specified as having around 160,000,000,000 bytes of storage space which windows (or another OS) will state as less than 160Gb.

Check your drice properties from My Computer, the capacity in Gb and Bytes will be stated there.

I have 2x80Gb disks on the machine I'm on just now. One is just over 82,000,000,000 bytes and reads as 76.6Gb, the other is just over 80,000,000,000 bytes and 74.5Gb.

This has always annoyed me a little but it's pretty standard practice and has been around since drives were comparitively low on capacity and so the difference between the two calculations was much smaller.

Oh and take the £29 if they are offering it

I'll second mutzi and bookworm. Even without the technical info, basically, nobody has ever created a 145 Gig Hard drive. Lost gigabytes is the norm. On top of all that, they could also be using some "hidden" space as a recovery partition.

Take the money and run, and just be thankful that they are too stupid to know about the items they well (actually very worrying!)

And i'll 3rd it - no such thing as a 145BG hard drive, not in a normal desktop pc or laptop anyway. As already said it's just space used up by the installed programs, operating system etc, then some PC's also have a partition which makes it easy for engineers to restore the main programs.

Sorry i stand corrected LOL!

You could had got three times more for your money from Dell online so i am surprised you dont just get the PC back to LXDirect and shop around. The harddrive is the correct ratio as other guys have mentioned previous however not entry level for a PC these days. Do your self a favour refuse it and shop around. I spit on these companies that offer underrated goods for high prices and charges interest on top, I learned through experience unfortunatley but great sites like this make you wise up.

This topic was closed on 10 March 2019.

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