When I first started it up it was 170gb is there anyway to get it to at least 200? And what can I get rid of on an HP laptop that won’t screw it up?
A very silly but useful hack I did to get the MS flight sim install down to about 40GB (normally ~270GB) before I gave up on windows was this.
Set up a nextcloud server on a raspberry pi.
Install the client on your windows machine.
Add your games install folder as a connection on the nextcloud client and enable VFS (virtual filesystem)
Once synced, right click the folder and select “free up space…”
This will basically delete the file data from your local machine and redownload it whenever windows tries to access a file.
Now launch your game and it’ll take a while to start as it has to redownload the files it actually needs to run, but it won’t bother getting what it doesn’t have to.
hp is notorious for pre installing apps that you dont need, it’s called bloatware. you can maybe remove some of those.
Golden rule is to never use a computer with the OS that was preloaded. You’ll never know what they put in there.
Reinstall Windows and then debloat it. Here’s a guide from AtlasOS. I recommend it to all my friends who have just bought a new laptop. I have no complaints from them. Windows Updates, Defender, Microsoft Store work as expected.
The hard drive may be 256gb but a big chunk of that is taken up by Windows and also there will be a hidden recovery partition. So 170gb sounds about right. You can’t reduce how much space windows takes, and the recovery partition is worth keeping in case you get in to trouble.
There may be programs HP have installed that you can remove in add/remove software to make a bit more space. HP is notorious for bliatware - installing things to try and sell you stuff. Probably a good few gb may be that crap.
If you download a big game, then it’s not a big deal if you’re using that game. 80gb is still plenty. And you can delete the game when you’re done and use that 90gb for something else.
256gb isn’t much but it’s enough unless you want multiple big games installed or have a big library of data such as movies or pictures.
Also it may be possible to upgrade the hard drive - depends on the model and how accessible the hard drive is. If you can access the hard drive to replace it then you could get a 1tb drive for example. There are guides online but basically you’d need to copy the existing drive to the new drive (would need a USB adaptor to mount the new drive first) and then swap the drives round. It very much depends on the laptop though.
Another option is an external hard drive connected via USB - it’s not good for gaming or running big programmes but it is fine for storing movies and pictures.
If the priority is to have multiple different big games installed at the same time, then upgrade the hard drive. Most HP models it’s generally doable without much fuss. More difficult with the ultra slim devices though. Search for your model online and see what people have done.
Ram and (ssd) storage are two different things. Storage space is the one relevant to this question. Also, both of those numbers, 8 gb of ram and 256 gb of disk space, are very low these days.
If you’re using the laptop with the software it came with, it might have a bunch of demo versions of useless apps as advertisements. HP is (or at least used to be) notorious for this crap. Somewhere in the settings should be an apps page that lists what’s installed, check there.
Yeah that’s your best bet, remove all the bloatware and regain 20 GB+
256 is absolutely fine unless you work with video editing or games. If you’re just growing the net it’ll last you forever.
Tbh I thought this was a shitpost trying to get people to Linux
Nope so far I got it up to 170 gb with revo unistaller It just kind of makes me think I would have an air tight case for false advertising.
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I recommend swapping in a new SSD . Use something like clonezilla to mirror the SSD from the old one to the new.
Also see whether you can bump the RAM in that box: laptops often have a LOT of junk that starts on boot that just seems to eat RAM, not the least of which is Windows itself. Adding RAM will have the most immediate effect once you’ve found the space to install things.
You can get a terabyte SSD for like $50 these days. It might be worth it to just upgrade.
Providing it’s not soldered to the motherboard like Apple does with no way to add more.
Clean install without the HP bloat, backup the important stuff elsewhere first.
Another thing: Are you subscribed to a bajillion mods? That is the case for me. My CoD Black Ops 3 is 30GB, with DLC is 90GB, after Steam workshop mods is 377 GB.
I never download mods. I make a point of it. If a game is released and stands on it own I may think about it but thats it.
Lots of people commenting about the laptop here, so let me offer something different. What’s that one game you downloaded? Because if it is Ark: Survival Evolved (or Ascended) then still having 80G left is pretty good!
I am going to date myself but its Watch Dogs 2
excellent choice :)
You obviously need to download more RAM.
Probably just a lot of bloatware. When I’ve been in this situation in the past, I did a completely fresh install of windows. Much smaller. Linux can free up even more space.
There really isn’t anything necessary from HP, but it also depends a lot on your comfort working with the computer so ymmv. I don’t know what’s gonna happen if 3 months down the line you need to call customer support for something. If it were me, I’d be thinking “worst case scenario I can just factory reset”, especially if I had everything important backed up somewhere.
so long as it’s under warranty. yea. make sure you have a way to actually do the ‘factory reset’.
if you nix the partitions during a ‘clean install’ of windows or of linux, you won’t.
unless you’ve made a backup image of the hdd to an external (using reflect or similar), or in hp’s case–download their recovery media creator (runs on windows only but doesn’t have to be the target system) and build a recovery flash drive for your model.
If you downloaded the game illegally then installed it on your hard drive then… You have your answer.
You might still have the downloaded game and you have the installed game. Depending on the fiability of your download source there might also be temporary install file, somewhere.
Could be on there up to three times. Once as the downloaded archive, once as the expanded archive, and once as the installed game.
Look up WizTree for a quick way to see/fix what’s taking up your space.
This is the answer, you can actually visually see what’s taking the storage space.
Windirstat
WizTree seems to be quite a bit faster, with almost identical look&feel
Windirstat is way, way, way slower. WizTree scans my entire drive in literal seconds.
WizTree scans my entire drive
It doesn’t, really. It’s already indexed. It’s a feature of the NTFS file system. It’s the same way Everything Search can find files almost instantly, and what Windows Search used back when it worked properly in the Windows XP days.
Why Microsoft stopped using that and switched to whatever the current useless search function uses escapes comprehension, though it probably has something to do with them wanting to shove Bing results and other spam in there.
Why do you need "to get it to at least 200”?
Yeah, that’s like 80% free. Windows itself is bloated and if you add a couple modern games on top of that… Good luck.
