HDD space disappears when downgrading OS

My company bought a bunch of new HP desktops (s5220f). I am switching them from the pre-installed Windows 7 home to Windows XP pro. During XP pro install when it asks me how to partition and where to install the OS it can only find 131 GB of HDD space, but the hard drive is 640 GB. I went ahead with the install with a single partition of all 131 GB. It worked perfectly and left me with 121 GB of free space after updates, which is actually more than enough in this office.

But, where did my 509 GB of space go? :confused

 

Might depend on when your version of XP was purchased. Early releases had an HD limitation which was rectified by the SP's, so as Halo suggests you need to load SP2.

 

I already had updated to SP2, so I used that program Halo linked me to and it worked fine. I'm now rockin' 640,131,899,392 B. Which is actually 596 GB. Damn the fact that 2^10 doesn't equal 1000! :cry

On another note I see that instead of the 4 GB of RAM I should have, windows XP only sees 3.24 GB of RAM. What's the explanation for that one?

Oh, and thanks Halo.

 

That's because you're using a 32-bit OS that can only see 3.5 or so GB of RAM.

 

Any 32-bit OS, whether it be XP, Vista, MAC OS, or Linux can only "see" and use 3.5GB of RAM (or thereabouts). It is a design limitation of the 32-bit software idea.

If you want to remove it, upgrade to 64-bit. This is limited to 128GB of RAM (I think) although that is a lot more than most motherboards can handle!

64-bit OSes need 64-bit hardware, in case you decide to upgrade.

 

I see, you guys sure are knowledgeable.