Dell Inspiron 600m - Hard Drive capacity reduction

I had two of those POS' from work, the 30 gig drive will actually be less, maybe 28-29 or so formated, that's normal as HD manufacturers base a meg on 1000k instead of 1024k. There is most likely a small partition with dell diags on it taking up a about a gig or two, go to disk manager and see what it shows. I'd recommend wiping the drive and do a clean install of xp, that will rid you of the diag partition and get rid of dell installed crap. I had 2 HD's, both 30gig, die in one of them and one hd die in the other, I think they were all hitachi drives.