With hundreds of gigs at one’s disposal, how do documents and pictures of a couple megs add up to fill a disk? Well, they do add up, but only to some extent. Furthermore, if you play games or store video files, you can be eating gigs at a time. Still, it seems to fill up faster than it should, and you aren’t just being a grumpy pessimist type. The glass is indeed half-empty, i.e., your drive is already half-full.
Surfing the web, downloading things, uninstalling software, and so on, leaves behind all kinds of stuff you really don’t need. It might be dangerous and full of malware or it might not, but at the very least, it is taking up space. The next article shows you a few tricks and introduces some free software you can use to get back some hard disk space.
Well, that has to do with how your hard disk records, finds, and disposes of information. Allow an analogy involving Moose, a college athlete. Moose breezed through high school, but he plans on getting the most of his scholarship.
Moose doesn’t have a lot of the skills most students picked up long ago. He knows from observation that he has to take notes, but not how to organize them. He buys a massive, blank, notebook (paper not digital). He goes to each course’s first class and takes notes. The notes for one course begin on the first blank page after the notes for the previous course, with no pages in between. The next week he repeats the process, and so on for the term.
Obviously it is hard to keep track of everything, so he numbers his notebook pages and keeps track of where all the notes for a certain course are by writing it down in a table inside the cover of his notebook.
When Moose reads his notes, he checks his table, flips to the page for the course in question, and reads. When he gets to the end of that day’s notes, he goes back to the table, then flips to the next section and so on. Admittedly, it's not the most efficient way to do things; but it gets the job done, and Moose survives the winter examinations.
