Question about my HP laptop

[GM4spd]

My daughter gave me her 3 year old laptop---wiping everything off it,
except the Windows system. I put virus protection and my stuff on it
See this pic when I open "my computer" showing storage---




Should I be concerned about the lack of storage on the
recovery side? What does this mean? Thanks for any guidance.

[rplusplus]

What that is... is your OS back up. Usually you create your back up discs and then you can delete that partition and reclaim that space.

[rplusplus]

Depending on what year it was... you should look on your start menu and find RECOVERY MANAGER>RECOVERY DISK MAKER. You do that and it makes 1-2 DVD's or up to 8 CD's so if your HD ever craps out you can reinstall Windows. If you alreayd have recovery discs you can just delete that partition.

[d4v0s]

The recovery partition houses the Diagnostic utilities as well as a full image of the factory windows system, If you run the recovery you will end up with a HP factory laptop with all of your files missing!

I know a few clients who "recovered" their laptops only to find everything gone. so be careful.

If you want a real backup, snag yourself a Western Digital, or Seagate External Hard drive and setup a windows backup to run weekly.

You can also use the SeaTools backup software if you get a SeaGate drive, it automatically scans your hard drive and looks for changes to files (documents, music, pictures so on...) then backs them up (Called incremental).

If your looking for an awesome Bare Metal Recovery Solution (meaning an exact copy of your system) see if you can find a copy of Ghost 11.5 as this will work for Windows 7/Vista. There are also a bunch of Linux utilities that can perform Disk Cloning and allow you to recover Everything on your drive in the event of failure. If you like awesome paid apps look into Acronis. They are hands down the best for home user backups.

[high_revs]

qm4spd, how did you wipe the laptop? Or are you just deleting right now.

that is a REALLY large size just for factory image for recovery purposes. But having it there makes recovery faster vs using dvds where they have to extract and temporarily be on hard drive. But if you want that space back there should be a way to burn them off to dvd and claim that 10gb back.

maybe your dauhter put some stuff in that partition?

[JDay]

that is a REALLY large size just for factory image for recovery purposes.

Actually it is not.

[Nose Nuggets]

Actually it is not.

yeah, for a win7/vista image, drivers, crapware, possible software bundles (dvd, cd burning, maybe even an office'esk suite) plus diags.

8-9gb sounds about right.