Erroneous drive space allocations on '09 MacBook Pro

I have a mid 2009 MacBook Pro that is having some serious, and erroneous, drive space issues. My MacBook has the same size hard-drive as my mini, and has an identical install of software--it's basically a portable version of my desktop. However, Disk Utility on my MacBook indicates the following:
Available: 191.17 GB
Used: 308.08 GB
Number of Folders: 195,276
Number of Files: 758,438
and my mini indicates the following:
Available: 359.6 GB
Used: 139.65 GB
Number of Folders: 196,604
Number of Files: 910,017
The MacBook has fewer folders and files than the mini (I have music and video files on the mini but not on the MacBook), but a lot less available space. Again, to be clear, they both have an identical install of software.
Until last night, when I deleted 2 VirtualBox VMs on both machines, all was well. However, on the MacBook, it wouldn't let me empty my trash for some reason. I ended up going to the command-prompt as SUDO to rm the one file that was stuck in the trash. But now I have these erroneous drive space allocations.
Does anyone know how I can clear this up on my MacBook?
Thanks!

What Kurt Shutte said, plus the fact that a "160GB" hard drive is actually only 149GB because (see the asterisk where Apple advertises the size of the drives) most hard drive manufacturers these days unfortunately define 1GB as 10003=1,000,000,000 bytes, not the mathematically correct and larger 230=1,0243 bytes. Which means that a hard drive that is advertised as 160GB is really only 149GB. Before formatting, operating system and application installation.

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Message was edited by: OGELTHORPE

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Erroneous drive space allocations on '09 MacBook Pro

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