STREAMLINE YOUR DATA

STRUGGLING WITH AN UNDERSIZED SSD? DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH EXPLAINS HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF YOUR PRECIOUS DISK SPACE

- DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH

Modern laptops are amazing things, with ultra-slim designs, bright screens and powerful processors. Storage, however, tends to be a sticking point. To keep the price down, entry-level computers often have a small SSD with a capacity of only 256GB or even 128GB, much of which is instantly eaten up by the operating system and core applications.

That’s fine if you just want to browse the web and edit the odd Word document, but when it comes to playing games, editing movies or otherwise taking advantage of your PC’s potential, space can quickly become tight. Here’s our advice on stretching your storage to get the best from your computer.

Use the built-in clean-up tool

Let’s start with a simple tool that’s been built into every release of Microsoft’s OS since Windows 98. To open it, hit the Windows key and enter “Disk Clean-up”; a window will open detailing various categories of file, with an estimate of how much space each type is taking up. All of these can be safely deleted by ticking their boxes and hitting the OK button at the bottom of the window.

Hit the “Clean up system files” button at the bottom of the window and some additional categories will appear, including files left over from upgrading and updating Windows. These can be quite substantial – on my personal laptop those categories weighed in at 4.56GB and 2.48GB respectively, which is an amount of space that’s well worth reclaiming. After deleting these you won’t be able to remove the updates or roll back to an earlier version of Windows, but when did you last do that anyway?

Track down outsized files and folders