Question:
I was hoping to get my PC to you for a clean-up and also to help us deal with memory shortage. We got a new digital camera recently and the photos are considerably larger than our former camera’s photos. I went to check the memory the other day and we we were down to 3% left! I cleaned some things out but there’s not much more in terms of programs that I want to get rid of. I have made back up copies of the photos but because we haven’t ordered prints yet for many of the photos we still want them on the PC so we can get at them through our Picasa program. Still, we’re wondering if we shouldn’t go to an external drive or add internal memory–what do you suggest? Also, we recently got a Macbook. Could we use an external drive to back-up both a PC and a Macbook? Is this possible and something to consider?
Answer:
Most desktop machines are easily able to store between 20,000 and 100,000 photos. Is there a lot of music or video stored on it, too? If you have a 100 gigabyte hard drive (small in comparison to what’s standard these days on a new desktop or laptop, with sizes ranging from 100 to 500+ gigabytes), you can store thousands of photos, music files, documents, video clips, etc. It sounds like perhaps something else is taking up space & needs to be cleaned out. As a general rule, documents and programs take up very little space, percentage-wise, compared to the total amount of data you’re storing. It’s easy to upgrade to a larger drive & if you need additional storage, it would definitely be worth it (to save the aggravation of having to constantly burn to CD or remove data from disk to free up space.
It’s definitely worth doing a quick disk clean-up. Following the steps on this posting to read about it.
You should probably get an external drive anyway. Click here to view a posting about choosing an external backup device.
We hope that information is helpful to you.
