BleepingComputer.com: Vista Reboot

ok, what i have is a dell inspiron 1525 laptop with windows vista 32bit.

i have to reinstalled vista on it, but my hard drive is still saying ive used like 70Gb of space, and i cant connect to the internet or any thing. i have all the disks that came with it, but now i have no idea what to do. do i have to sinatll stuff off the disk that says "drivers and utilities?" and if so, what? i really need help asap please. rather get this taken care of befor mom finds out.

Go to Start and type in "devmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) and press Enter
That'll open the Device Manager - which will show you which devices are having problems (by the yellow !'s or red x's)
Those are the devices that you'll need to install.

First, read this article on the order in which to install Dell device drivers: http://support.dell.com/support/topics/glo...;l=en&s=gen

If you can't tell what the devices are, right click on the device and select "Properties",
then select the Details tab, and in the dropdown box select "Hardware ID"
From the hardware ID, get the 4 characters after the VEN_ and the DEV_
Then go to http://www.pcidatabase.com and look up the Vendor ID/ Device ID there - it'll have a description of the device.

ok, that worked great and thank you very much. but why dose drive C still say its 56% full? when theres nothing on it. its defreggin now, will that fix it?

Go to Start, then to Computer and check to see how much space is occupied (in gB) According to Dell, the 1525 comes with an 80, 120, 160 or 250 gB hard drive. That would mean that 50% is 40, 60, 80, or 125 gB

If that is the case, then use this free program to see what's hogging the disk space: http://w3.win.tue.nl/en/research/research_...on/sequoiaview/

ok, says 66.8GB free of 136.

ok, i see these 3 files "windows old" 0,1, and 2. is this the back up of my old files? and can i delet them?

Right click on each of the windows old directories and select "Properties" - then see how much space is being taken by them.

As for deleting them, it's OK to delete them as long as there's nothing in there that you want to save. Once you delete them you won't be able to revert back to the older versions (if you wanted to).

DO NOT delete the one that's just plain "Windows" - that's essential for Windows to run on your system.