Guess what else is misleading. YOUR RAM!!! You may have 512mb of RAM, but your bios will actually see what you have. I something near 514mB of RAM.
This is probalbly to do with 2's compliment. 512Megs is 1024*512 Kilo sp ergo 524288K.

2^10 = 1024

8 bits in 1 byte , 1024 bytes in 1Kbyte, 1024 Kbytes in 1MByte etc etc

i think this is where you will find the real truth.

Ram is not like Hdd's since its made to measure, where as Hdd's have a certain ammount of space and would you believe that u can get almost 80gigs out of a 80gig hdd, like 99% of the disc. IF the data is stored LINEAR, like an audio cd.

If you only intended to use your hdd like an audio cd.

I wonder if there are programs which allow the drive to be used in this way, hmmmm

what also effects the ammount of space you get out of a drive is the file system. and surprisingly you get MORE space out of NTFS than you do via fat32, tho fat32 is slighty faster, NTFS is safer for data in any sense, less likely to get corrupted.

Xanex