Hard Disk Capacity

Hi I recently bought my first Mac, It says i have a 55.6GB hard drive but it said on 37.0 as available. Why is this i have not installed anything, is there anyway of sorting this out.

Thanks

The operating system is taking up the space. The 55gigs would only be available if you had nothing whatsover on the disk, but then you wouldn't be able to use the computer.
Go to the Applications folder say, and press apple-I. You can see how much space that folder is using up for example.

ok cheers mate

yeah, wait til you put your music on there.

i got the 80gb and i'm squeezing by. i'm going to wait til 250gb lap top HD's are around and affordable then swap it out.

With laptops, it's useful to carry around a good portable firewire drive. They're a bit costly, but they're really small and good for storing big chunks, like movies. You get 80gig ones by now.

Obviously, an internal drive is a lot mor comfy .

And about the disk, not only is OS X taking up space, but the file system on the disk will never result in the full capacitiy being available. This is often and best seen on iPods.