Why does windows lose a few gigs

I'm installing XP on two computers right now, why the hell does it lose a persentage of space ?

My 200 gb system lost 10 gb of space, the bios saw it all, but windows came up with 190? Is there a way to get that back? I just lost 4gb on my 80 gb laptop, I may install linux on that part but you know wtf ?

 

Its just how the formatting goes, It happens almost if not all the time. Formatting harddrives takes up space, so u could buy a 200GB harddrive but after formatting it and installing windows you could end up with 195 or even 190, or even less, just how life is i guess :\.

 

To manufacturers, 1000MB=1GB

To any computer/someone with a bit of intelligence, 1024MB=1GB

OSs go by 1024MB, manufactures 1000MB.

There's your loss.

 

It's the file system. eg, FAT32, NTFS. Along with being short changed in the megabyte department.

 

The file system only has a small influence.

It's because drive manufacturers use decimal, 1KB = 1000 bytes, whereas Windows uses binary, 1KB = 1024 bytes.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive