How do I increase a laptop storage space?

zagubov

Just be careful with memory cards. Some laptops are flaky with them. Borrow one if you can and try it out. Might be better to buy a USB stick.

External hard drives are best of all but don't always run. Some of the cheaper laptops don't deliver enough power.

You might be wise to try and borrow a few friends devices to try out to see what works.

EveryWhere

Do come back with the full model number before purchasing anything. As that will determine the type of card that you need. Older Streams take an SDHC card. Newer, microSD.

Norman_Castle

Janey1a wrote: »

Would I be able to uninstall all the printer software and maybe store that on a plug in instead? That way, I'd only have to plug it in when I want to print or scan etc.

Some software can be unnecessarily oversize. Can you install just the printer driver?

motorguy

pramsay13 wrote: »

My laptop has 16GB storage.

Bloody hell, thats tiny!! :eek:

My last laptop had that much RAM.

Even my mobile phone has 256GB on board storage (although thats a bit of an exception i know)

Whats the make and model?

Andy_L

motorguy wrote: »

Bloody hell, thats tiny!! :eek:

My last laptop had that much RAM.

Even my mobile phone has 256GB on board storage (although thats a bit of an exception i know)

Whats the make and model?

jeradon

Not sure what model of laptop you have, but getting an SSD with bigger capacity will also speed up your machine.

motorguy

jeradon wrote: »

Not sure what model of laptop you have, but getting an SSD with bigger capacity will also speed up your machine.

Most of those 32GB machines on the market have on board, soldered in (and non SSD) storage so its rarely upgradable like you can with a regular laptop.

googler

Norman_Castle wrote: »

Some software can be unnecessarily oversize. Can you install just the printer driver?

This. Select the most basic install of printer software, and don't include any bells and whistles like photo-editing and the like...

Janey1a

HP 14" Stream 14-ax000na 4GB 32GB

It was £250 which is a lot of money for me and I didn't think this was an unreasonable amount for a basic laptop.

Does this help those of you who asked for the detail before advising what I could do?

Many thanks.

TonyMMM

I have a small notebook with a 32GB drive - great bit of kit, and really useful, but the "C drive" is really only designed to hold the operating system and a few other bits. For more storage you need to add an SD card, which is cheap and easy to do. You shouldn't have any problem loading a printer driver on it though.

Even with a full install of the latest Win10, Microsoft Office and a few other programs I still have just over 6Gb of my drive free, so something is taking up the space on yours.

I would start by seeing what your son has saved on there (music, pictures, videos etc.), and move those to an SD card, remove any programs you never use (especially the HP stuff it will have come pre-installed with) and then run Disk Cleanup to free up the space you have.