Hi Chip,
I've never had or seen a computer purchased from one of the factories that had the full amount of advertised HDD (Hard Drive Disk or Hard Disk Drive). Even building a computer, you will have less hard drive, because of stuff you install. Kinda hard for me to explain....so...
Do hard drive vendors lie? http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/fat1.html
"You might notice that the new hard drive that you installed, gives you less than the amount of storage space advertised. Why is that? Well, the marketing department of the vendor doesn't know too much about bits and bytes and binary system. To make it easier to calculate, they assume that 1 KB is 1000 Bytes, 1 MB is 1000 KB, etc. which of course is wrong as you just learned a minute ago. So when they have a drive that can hold 8,400,000,000 Bytes, they just call it 8.4 GB and say that's close enough for government work. Not so.
To figure out the correct size of that drive, divide 8,400,000,000 Bytes by 1024 and you'll get 8,203,125 KB. Divide that by 1024, and you get 8,010 MB. Divide that by 1024 and you get 7.82 GB which is the actual size of your hard drive in GB. That's several hundred MB off from the 8.4 GB you though you would get."
Also....http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage/a/ActualHDSizes.htm
The way I look at it is that using the formula above left your HDD with 37.25 GD. The WinXP Operating System took aprx 2GB, the WinXP SP2 took 395MB, the System Restore took 500MB, so that left aprx 34.36 GB left. Consider that your your anti-virus program took some MB and other small programs like Spyware, etc... and Dell installed programs could have eaten up the remaining 368.6MB.
I kinda recall that my latest computer's 100GB HDD had only around 93GB when new and I know my others had less than advertised (none Dell).