Give me some space!

June 2, 2015 10:33 PM

I am at my wit's end trying to clear out more hard drive space on my laptop.

It's a Lenovo T530, solid state, and it has 94.1 GB. I only use it for work, and I keep trying to clear out space, but it keeps adding up. I have one program on there I use for work, which is necessary, and then what I consider to be essential programs like Dropbox, Word, Malwarebytes, etc.

So I'm looking towards adding more space. Is this possible on a laptop? Could I get the entire hard drive replaced with a bigger SSD? Is this something I can do myself or should I take it to a computer guy?

I would appreciate any and all suggestions. Thank you.

posted by madonna of the unloved to Technology (11 answers total)

Do you need all of your Dropbox folders synced to your local machine? If not, pick the important stuff to mirror on your computer and access the rest off the web interface when needed.
posted by homesickness at 11:01 PM on June 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

WinDirStat will show you how what files are using what space.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:09 PM on June 2, 2015 [7 favorites]

If it were me I'd get a larger drive. If you have Windows, I'd look at pagefile.sys and consider whether it would made sense to manually set it to something lower.
posted by univac at 11:58 PM on June 2, 2015

Physically replacing the SSD on this machine is quite simple if you're handy with a screwdriver. Moving your data can be a little funky, but is certainly doable. Check out your comfort level with the Free Clonezilla or the commercial Ghost to decide if you want to do the migration yourself.
posted by so at 11:59 PM on June 2, 2015

nthing WinDirStat. I use it all the time for ferreting out where space is going on the dozens of servers I manage.
posted by MonsieurBon at 12:00 AM on June 3, 2015

What is your OS?

You can disable hibernation. By default, hibernation reserves space on your hard drive equivalent to the amount of RAM the computer has. The link applies to Windows Vista and 7.

Also, nthing using selective sync on your Dropbox.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 6:43 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I just went through this myself. Run Disk Clean-up as an Administrator, then you will have an additional option of removing old System Restore Points.

I did this on my ~6 year old Win7 laptop and got about 40GB of space back.
posted by TinWhistle at 7:00 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Lenovo T530 has a thing called "Ultrabay Slim Media Bay". Right now your computer probably has a DVD drive installed, but if you don't need the DVD drive, you can replace it with an SATA adapter. This is one such adapter I found. Then just get an additional SATA SDD or HDD of the appropriate dimensions and capacity and copy excess data from your main drive to the expansion drive.
posted by Green With You at 7:58 AM on June 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Seems like replacing the drive would be the best replacement.

A program like CCleaner also helps clean unneeded files off your computer.

Also, you could add another drive in your mSata slot (which might be currently used by your wifi card) or even just pop in a SD card in the card reader (a 64 GB card would almost double your space for cheap) if you just want to store pictures or music or stuff like that. Also you could buy an external drive to keep that stuff on too.
posted by roaring beast at 3:10 PM on June 3, 2015

WinDirStat is well liked and will certainly show you where you'll get the best bang for your cleanup buck. Personally I prefer another tool that does the same job - I find the very old free version of SpaceMonger a little easier to work with.
posted by flabdablet at 5:07 AM on June 4, 2015

Response by poster: Thank you, everyone! I will look into these options.
posted by madonna of the unloved at 2:33 PM on June 5, 2015