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This increase
in storage capacity has come from an
improvement in the quality and
cost-efficiency of the components and the
driving consumer need for more and more
storage space. It’s estimated that as much
as 98% of all information that exists today
was ‘born digital’ i.e. it did not exist
before someone created it in a digital
format. We’ve become a society that
functions on emails, websites and documents
and all of that information has to be stored
somewhere. And that’s before you’ve
mentioned entertainment, with digital
photos, videos and music compounding our
storage problems. All of this is nicely
supported by rising internet speeds, which
now make it possibly to email a 10MB
attachment without taking 3 days to deliver
it.
Unfortunately,
your 250GB hard disk doesn’t give you a full
250GB anyway to store your own files. The
‘operating system’ (e.g. Microsoft Windows)
takes its share first, then you need to
allow some free space for temporary ‘swap’
files and you may also have a portion of
space allocated to a ‘recovery partition’
(which contains a backup of specialist files
for your particular computer hardware).
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So, here are a
few tips for keeping your file storage use
under control:
1. Clean out temporary files
– each time you visit a website, it saves
some files (especially pictures) to your
computer to make it faster for your next
visit to that site.
These and
other temporary files aren’t always deleted
automatically and can add up to a
significant amount of space over
time. Install a utility to clean out these
temporary storage areas, or learn how to use
the inbuilt tools in your computer to do
this (e.g. Disk Cleanup).
2. Review your programs
– So many free software programs on the
internet can seem appealing, but little by
little they will start to cut into your free
disk space. Review and uninstall software
that you don’t need or don’t use.
3. Duplicates
– If you’ve ever saved an email attachment
to your computer to work on it and you still
have the original email, you’ve just doubled
the amount of storage needed. Be ruthless
with how you handle attachments, especially
the ones that also appear in your Sent email
folder too.
4. Quality versus quantity
– When it comes to media files like
pictures, audio and video, the file size is
directly related to the quality of the image
or recording. Whilst your digital camera may
produce amazing quality for high definition
printing, you may be able to compress
pictures if they are just being emailed or
added to a document, therefore also reducing
their size and storage requirement.
5. Add more hardware
– There is an
enormous range of options available if you
just really need more space, from replacing
your current internal hard disk with a
bigger one, to adding external storage via
USB hard disk enclosures or even network
attached disks.
If your
computer is starting to struggle, the disk
space is one of the first things we’ll look
at, so talk to your local Computer
Troubleshooter about the best way to handle
your digital storage requirements.
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