Helpful Tips #3 - How Much Stuff Can I Put On My Computer?

Something we are regularly asked by customers is how much storage space they have on their computer. This is easy to check; click on Computer (on the Start menu, or maybe on your desktop), right-click on the C:/ drive and then click on 'Properties'. This will give you a display showing how much space your computer has, and how much is currently used.

(Note: These instructions might vary slightly between different versions of Windows.)

But what do the results actually mean? If I am using 50GB of 200GB, and so have 75% of my disk 'free', what else can I put on my computer.

A computer stores data in 'bytes'. In terms of a document, or piece of writing, such as this blog post, a byte is roughly one character - storing this letter 'A' is one byte. However even a simple document is larger, in terms of bytes, than the sum total of the letters in it; the document file also contains information about the document, such as formatting, modification dates and so forth. For example, a Word 2002 document containing the single letter 'A' is still roughly 20,000 bytes in size.

Bytes are abbreviated to 'B', so a 100 byte file will be displayed as 100B. 1024 bytes make up a kilo-byte (KB). So, in the above example, the Word document is roughly 20 kilo-bytes in size (20,000 bytes). Indeed, for most home use purposes it's easier to think of a kilo-byte as being 1000 bytes; the reason for it actually being 1024 is tied up in how the computer actually stores information, and involves maths, binary numbers and more complexity than most people are willing to bother with at this stage.

Anyway, if you see a file is 1.2KB, you know it's roughly 1200 bytes in size. Simple.

A mega-byte (MB) is roughly 1000 kilo-bytes (again, it's actually 1024), which makes it 1,000,000 bytes. So a 3.2MB file is 3200KB, or 3,200,000 bytes.

A giga-byte (GB) is roughly 1000 mega-bytes, or 1,000,000 kilo-bytes or 1,000,000,000 bytes. If your computer tells you that you have 150GB of free disk space, then it's roughly equivalent to 150,000MB or 150,000,000KB or 150,000,000,000 bytes. One hundred and fifty thousand million instances of the letter 'A' ...

All files on your are made up of bytes - pictures, music, videos, the various components of Windows itself. How many bytes in size a file is depends on what format it is in; a 3 minute piece of music, for example, may be 3MB if it's in .MP3 format, but 30MB in size if it's a .WAV file. A picture from your digital camera will vary in size depending on the resolution you use (and explaining resolution on cameras is a lesson in itself). So there are no set rules on how many 'songs', pictures, videos or so forth your computer can hold. If you consistently get something from the same source - pictures from the same camera, music from iTunes and so forth - then the size per minute, or per image, will remain fairly constant, which will help you calculate how much of your remaining space they take up.

But let's have a look at what you can hold on your computer, with some approximations. We'll assume that you have 150GB of free space remaining.

If you're storing movies, and each movie is roughly 1GB in size, you have room for 150 such movies on your computer (150GB/1GB).

If you're downloading music, and each piece is roughly 2MB in size for each minute, then you can hold 500 minutes of music per GB, or a total of 75,000 minutes of music. That's over 1000 albums, or 25,000 three-minute songs.

If your photos are about 1MB in size, then you can hold 150,000 of them - 1000 pictures fill 1GB of space, and you have 150GB of space.

In the examples above, a movie is equivalent to 500 minutes of music (about 140 'songs') or 1,000 photos. But, as we have said before, this all depends on your file formats; there's a lot of variation.

Finally, whatever you store on your computer's hard-disk, remember to take back ups, either to CD/DVD or to an external hard-drive. Nobody wants to lose their stuff, after all.