On Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:09:51 -0700 (PDT), Danny Kewl wrote:

Hi, I have a laptop I'm looking at for my niece that has Vista
Business edition, with SP 2 I believe. The laptop is a school issue
Tangent brand. It has a 120 GB hard drive, and it says about 60 GB is
used. I can as a "guesstimate" account for maybe 10 GB or so for
system files, and applications that are installed. However, her
Documents folder is bare except for the sample files that came with
the PC. I even did a search for large files over about 100 MB, and
come up with not much that can be using that memory. I did separate
searches for common image files, video files, document files, and
found most to be images in apps like small gifs and pngs, and sorting
by size shows nothing substantial in size or number of files. I only
see one user account. What else can I look for or suspect? Thanks
much.

Download WinDirStat. It's free and it makes a graphical representation
of all folders and files. Things will become obvious, in my opinion.

http://windirstat.info/

It might be that there is a hidden partition that uses some of the
missing space. Look for that in Disk Management.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)