When I first started it up it was 170gb is there anyway to get it to at least 200? And what can I get rid of on an HP laptop that won’t screw it up?
Cant you upgrade the laptop? Would you share the model?
Just adding for op that crucial has some drives on sale right now.
I’m concerned about OP’s ability to upgrade a drive based on the nature of the question. I’d like to also throw in some help with cloning a drive.
Try a Linux install of something lightweight like mint/xfce to eliminate OS bloat.
Steam has a built in compatibility layer you can manage from your library page, so if your laptop could run a game on windows it should easily run it on mint with the spared resources and you’ll have all that spare space from ditching windows crap.
Guy is asking if he can download free software to get more ssd space. And while TECHNICALLY Linux does fit the bill for this (and is awesome), I’m willing to wager OP does not have the technical skill set for it at this time.
installing and using mint is waaayyy easier than reformatting a drive and installing and debloating windows
It’s funny the biases that crop up in these threads. Another poster says to format the drive and reinstall windows with de-bloating software and that gets upvoted while probably being a more complex process than installing Linux.
Probably just a lot of bloatware. When I’ve been in this situation in the past, I did a completely fresh install of windows. Much smaller. Linux can free up even more space.
There really isn’t anything necessary from HP, but it also depends a lot on your comfort working with the computer so ymmv. I don’t know what’s gonna happen if 3 months down the line you need to call customer support for something. If it were me, I’d be thinking “worst case scenario I can just factory reset”, especially if I had everything important backed up somewhere.
so long as it’s under warranty. yea. make sure you have a way to actually do the ‘factory reset’.
if you nix the partitions during a ‘clean install’ of windows or of linux, you won’t.
unless you’ve made a backup image of the hdd to an external (using reflect or similar), or in hp’s case–download their recovery media creator (runs on windows only but doesn’t have to be the target system) and build a recovery flash drive for your model.
You can get a terabyte SSD for like $50 these days. It might be worth it to just upgrade.
Providing it’s not soldered to the motherboard like Apple does with no way to add more.
Why do you need "to get it to at least 200”?
Yeah, that’s like 80% free. Windows itself is bloated and if you add a couple modern games on top of that… Good luck.
Chances are good you could get a new larger ssd installed, right off the bat you won’t get the full amount of storage advertised, windows 11 takes up around 18 gb. I don’t know how much junk HP loads however. 250gb doesn’t really give much room anymore, unless it’s for productivity.
windows 11 takes up around 18 gb
No way. Maybe a fresh minimal installation but Windows bloats up fairly quickly over time. I would use 250 GB partitions just for C: back when I was still using Windows and even that got tight in some cases.
As someone said - upgrade your storage. No excuse these days why someone can’t.
If it is a bottom of the barrel HP laptop it has a very high chance of being soldered RAM and storage with a glued case.
Well, OP failed to even detail what the hell model it is. As is the case with 95% of all tech questions where nobody states what model of computer it is despite it being stupid easy to know.
Financial, or knowledge are valid reasons. Idk if hp is going the way of apple and MS and soldering storage to the motherboard.
A very silly but useful hack I did to get the MS flight sim install down to about 40GB (normally ~270GB) before I gave up on windows was this.
Set up a nextcloud server on a raspberry pi.
Install the client on your windows machine.
Add your games install folder as a connection on the nextcloud client and enable VFS (virtual filesystem)
Once synced, right click the folder and select “free up space…”
This will basically delete the file data from your local machine and redownload it whenever windows tries to access a file.
Now launch your game and it’ll take a while to start as it has to redownload the files it actually needs to run, but it won’t bother getting it doesn’t have to.
wipe everything- HP is the worst possible company for preinstalled data mining bloatware. reinstall Tiny11 to further reduce Microsoft’s bloat. Then consider getting a 1tb portable SSD, most of them are plenty fast enough to support having games installed.
“Fast enough to having games installed” haha this reminds me of when I started gaming again after years, I saw games are now like 150gb so I considered it bulk data and put it on my HDDs 😬 but yea the stuff also needs to be loaded at some point
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I recommend swapping in a new SSD . Use something like clonezilla to mirror the SSD from the old one to the new.
Also see whether you can bump the RAM in that box: laptops often have a LOT of junk that starts on boot that just seems to eat RAM, not the least of which is Windows itself. Adding RAM will have the most immediate effect once you’ve found the space to install things.
Reinstall Windows and then debloat it. Here’s a guide from AtlasOS. I recommend it to all my friends who have just bought a new laptop. I have no complaints from them. Windows Updates, Defender, Microsoft Store work as expected.
linux
hp is notorious for pre installing apps that you dont need, it’s called bloatware. you can maybe remove some of those.
Golden rule is to never use a computer with the OS that was preloaded. You’ll never know what they put in there.
If you downloaded the game illegally then installed it on your hard drive then… You have your answer.
You might still have the downloaded game and you have the installed game. Depending on the fiability of your download source there might also be temporary install file, somewhere.
Could be on there up to three times. Once as the downloaded archive, once as the expanded archive, and once as the installed game.
The hard drive may be 256gb but a big chunk of that is taken up by Windows and also there will be a hidden recovery partition. So 170gb sounds about right. You can’t reduce how much space windows takes, and the recovery partition is worth keeping in case you get in to trouble.
There may be programs HP have installed that you can remove in add/remove software to make a bit more space. HP is notorious for bliatware - installing things to try and sell you stuff. Probably a good few gb may be that crap.
If you download a big game, then it’s not a big deal if you’re using that game. 80gb is still plenty. And you can delete the game when you’re done and use that 90gb for something else.
256gb isn’t much but it’s enough unless you want multiple big games installed or have a big library of data such as movies or pictures.
Also it may be possible to upgrade the hard drive - depends on the model and how accessible the hard drive is. If you can access the hard drive to replace it then you could get a 1tb drive for example. There are guides online but basically you’d need to copy the existing drive to the new drive (would need a USB adaptor to mount the new drive first) and then swap the drives round. It very much depends on the laptop though.
Another option is an external hard drive connected via USB - it’s not good for gaming or running big programmes but it is fine for storing movies and pictures.
If the priority is to have multiple different big games installed at the same time, then upgrade the hard drive. Most HP models it’s generally doable without much fuss. More difficult with the ultra slim devices though. Search for your model online and see what people have done.
