On top of that, most hard drives nowadays are not as big as they claim to be. That's 
because most HDD manufacturers now use the convention that one (1) GB equals 1,000,000,000 
bytes, but Windows still calculates through the old way, which is:

1 GB = 1024 MB = 1024 KB = 1024 B

So according to Windows, a modern 120 GB hard drive can contain:
120,000,000,000 bytes / 1024 (KB) / 1024 (MB) / 1024 (GB) = 111.76 GB, which means, 
according to Windows, your hard disk is not 120 GB, but only 112 GB. Means there's 
eight GB missing.





On a 25 GB hard disk this would mean
25,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = 23,28 GB. Two GB missing. Add that to the hidden 
files & folders the others mentioned, and it's easy to see you're missing quite a 
bit.
By the way, System Restore points don't show through the explorer, and for some reason 
I've never been able to show Temporary Internet Files through Explorer either. Both 
can really add up.

If you're really interested, you can download a tool called SeqoiaView here...
Link

It's a small tool that will show you the entire content of your harddrive on a single 
screen, with all the files represented by coloured squares. The size of a square 
shows how large the file that square represents is, relative to all the other files 
and to the entire capacity of the drive. Sound a bit complicated, but you'll get 
it if you try it, it's really very simple.

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