495 Computer Services

You can guarantee that technology is always changing and always improving.  This is particularly true for computer hard disk drives which provide the long-term storage for your files.  Not long ago, disk sizes of 250GB (Gigabytes) and 320GB would have only been needed by businesses (who could have afforded them), but now these sizes are accepted as standard for new home computers. 

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).

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.