It's supposed to have 123 gig of solid state memory, but . . .
 

it really is sucking up valuable space somewhere. If this is supposed to be a high-end executive pooter, it's not impressing me. c $1200 when new.

In this order across the Disc Management screen. One can not see into anything but the 89 and the 1 gig drives. The others just offer Help which gives an overview of the disc management. Gee, thanks.

I have put my MS Office on, and the Geek at Bust Buy said stuff that's there should be overwritten. ie, as I put W8.1 on, the other stuff should be heaved out to make room.

That's bad enough, but it seems it's short on numbers in the first place.

300mb (EFI Syst)

600 mb Recovery.

OS (C drive)89.13 Gig

350mb Recovery

1 Gig primary partition.

4.0 gig OEM Partition

20 Gig Recovery


So, not is it only a squitty little electric drive, even what's there is severely limited. Can this be acceptable to most modern users?

Just another thing on the list of 'Take it Back for Pete's sake!'

It's not clear from your post, but are you merely moaning about the 25g or so taken up by recovery space ? If so, either get over it or use the included tools to create a recovery disk and delete the recovery partitions (although this may be easier said than done and require a reformat if the recovery space is as fagmnted as you make out).

The sage advice would be the former as messing with recovery partitions is strictly at your own risk. Tea, biscuits and sympathy will not be served if you mess up.

Looks about right to me:

Your numbers add up to about 115.35 GiB
Your disk is probably 125 GB (Note the different units, used by disk manufacturers)

1 GB = roughly 0.9313 GiB
So 125 GB is 116 GiB

I think that compares very favourably with the numbers you list.

Used by disk manufacturers to quantity the byte capacity of disks, using base-10 number system.
1 GB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes (1000 cubed)

Used by Windows to report disk usage stats, using a base-2 number system.
1 GiB = 1,073,741,824 Bytes (1024 cubed)

Thanks Mac, that does look to be the answer.

Mixture. No bikkies then?

Making a disc means buying an external drive/DVD, or trusting the data to a stick. I imagine it would be pushing the limits of capacity, and are memory sticks reliable enough to cover such backups?* Can one use an external drive that's already in use, or does it have to be formatted and empty?

I just can't fathom out why they need to make 7 divisions - 2 before C and 4 after.

As an executive toy, this thing is rather pleasing, with graphics that are superb, but it just does not offer a professional working environment.

*OS backups. Given it's only on the drive anyway, it could be lost, and doing a total reinstall 'down the route' could be very problematical. The Windows key is no longer on the case, but embedded in the hardware and requires a dealer's MS disc to extract it. Or so they tell me. A 'Recover' disc would I hope obviate the need for this, but what if one had to download another copy and apply a key?

Welcome to the world of computer manufacturers dressing up cost savings as functionality improvements for the customer. You don't get a recovery CD because they cost money to master and distribute, hence you get a whopping 20Gb partition on your disk taken with a recovery image which they expect you to burn to CD the minute you start using it. It's win-win for the manufacturer, as they charge the uninitiated top dollar to 'fix' computers where the drive has gone and nobody thought* to take a backup

This is one of the few scenarios where i'd hate to be a 'user'

(*CBA)