windows showing hard drive size incorrectly

i had a lot of problems trying to get my current windows xp install to recognize my new 500gb hdd, and ended up just installing xp onto it. the install went fine and theres no sign of trouble, but windows recognizes it as only 465 gigs? in the bois it shows it as 500.1 gigs, and im not sure but i think when i was installing windows and selecting the hard drive, it showed it as 465, it was in mbs but the number looked a little small to me, 470,000 ish.

why is this and how do i get back my 35 gigs?
please and thank you.

 

Nobody ever gets full use of their hard drives. I have a 250gb that shows as 232gb and a 320gb that shows as 298gb. If you do the math, you lose about 7gb per 100gb to parities, partition tables, file allocation tables, etc. So, don't worry. All is normal.
:-D

 

thanks for the answer but thats very disappointing, youd think the clever people that make these things could find a way around it, or at least rate them closer to the actual amount you can get out of them.