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What is 25GB?
A geek would tell you that it's used when referring to the storage capacity of a hard drive. On this occasion 25 GB is the amount of free space given away by Windows Live Skydrive.
25 GB in numbers
Lets put 25 GB in perspective with some numbers. Crunch away!
25 GB is the maximum storage capacity of a Blu-Ray disc.
25 GB is also a blazingly fast broadband connection.
When it arrives, USB 3.0 will be able to transfer 25 GB worth of files in 70 seconds.
Addicted to work or simply chained to your desk, that's a mammoth 1,619,550 documents. I can only imagine the word count.
If we want to have some fun you could hypothetically store roughly 75 episodes of your favourite TV show, which in turn translates to 3420 minutes of downloaded TV. If we're talking seminal real-time drama '24' that's just shy of three seasons, each season being 24 episodes long. Now that's a lot of Jack Bauer.
If ear candy is more your bag you could open your own library with 3000 audiobooks. Or why not instead download 5000 mp3s of the Alexandra Burke single, which would provide you with 17,500 minutes of listening pleasure/displeasure?
Are you a keen photographer with an itchy trigger finger? If so 25GB would provide enough space for 15000 photos. Assuming you take 80 photos at the annual office Christmas party, that's 187.5 years worth of drunken shenanigans.
How do I get it?
All you need to claim your free 25GB of space is a Windows Live ID. If you have a Hotmail, Messenger, or Xbox LIVE account, you already have a Windows Live ID.
When is 1GB not 1GB?
When you're talking about computer memory, a gigabyte is measured as 1,073,741,824 bytes.
The math geeks among you express this as 1024 * 1024 * 1024. But when it boils down to hard disk space, a gigabyte is counted as one billion bytes, at least that's according to hard drive manufacturers. Said manufacturers use the true definition of giga-, which is 1,000 times as much as mega.
Picture the scene; you've just bought a shiny new hard drive and after bunging it into your rig you realise that you've already lost a few hundred precious MB. This resulting deficit is because hard drive manufacturers have a differing measuring system to the people that build your operating system.
There's a good chance that your 500 gigabyte hard drive will list its capacity as billions of bytes, but after you make allowances for the two different methods of calculation you'll be left with 465 gigabytes.
Enough chatter, give me my free 25 GB!
You do the math
Interestingly blank CDs adhere to a 2^10 math calculation. It's important to note that a 700MB CD is essentially 703MB in size, however a blank DVD-R is advertised at 4.7GB as per a hard disk. In reality you'll be hard pushed to get 4,700,000,000 bytes (almost 4.38 GB) out of this blank media.
Calculations were made based on the following assumptions:
Assuming average size of document is 8 pages, saved in Microsoft Word format.
Approximate number of songs. Assumes 4MB file size
Approximate number of standard JPEG pictures. JPEG file sizes vary based upon camera model and default settings, all photos taken at 5MP.
Approximate number of audiobooks. Assumes 3.7MB/hr. file size.
