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?
Ram and (ssd) storage are two different things. Storage space is the one relevant to this question. Also, both of those numbers, 8 gb of ram and 256 gb of disk space, are very low these days.
If you’re using the laptop with the software it came with, it might have a bunch of demo versions of useless apps as advertisements. HP is (or at least used to be) notorious for this crap. Somewhere in the settings should be an apps page that lists what’s installed, check there.
256 is absolutely fine unless you work with video editing or games. If you’re just growing the net it’ll last you forever.
Tbh I thought this was a shitpost trying to get people to Linux
Nope so far I got it up to 170 gb with revo unistaller It just kind of makes me think I would have an air tight case for false advertising.
Lots of people commenting about the laptop here, so let me offer something different. What’s that one game you downloaded? Because if it is Ark: Survival Evolved (or Ascended) then still having 80G left is pretty good!
I am going to date myself but its Watch Dogs 2
excellent choice :)
Clean install without the HP bloat, backup the important stuff elsewhere first.
Another thing: Are you subscribed to a bajillion mods? That is the case for me. My CoD Black Ops 3 is 30GB, with DLC is 90GB, after Steam workshop mods is 377 GB.
I never download mods. I make a point of it. If a game is released and stands on it own I may think about it but thats it.
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.
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.
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 what it doesn’t have to.
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.
As someone said - upgrade your storage. No excuse these days why someone can’t.
linux
i have a new hp laptop here with same specs (r3,17in,8gb,250ssd). cleaned-up and updated, with firefox, the user’s av, and a couple smaller programs, but no crud from being ‘used’ yet. ~ 172gb free.
your goal of 200gb free with hp’s factory load is not going to happen. you will have to reinstall from a plain win11 installer usb made from microsoft’s utility.
then after you’re installed, put windows into compact state:
compact /compactos:always
instructions herebefore you begin, i would highly recommend finding ‘hp cloud recovery tool’ from the windows ‘store’. install that, run it off the start menu (find it, right click, run-as-admin), and make a factory recovery usb for your model (the model number is on the bottom of the unit, usually, looks something like “63U47UA#ABA”). so you’ll need two empty flash drives. the hp recovery requires 32gb one. the windows installer one can be as small as 8gb i think.
all that, and you’ll probably still be a little short of your goal–and that’s without updates, junk added while used, and anything you may want to put on. and also remember ssd drives function best when they aren’t jam-packed with data. so you really should be considering an upgrade for the nvme ssd inside the laptop.
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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any way
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.
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.
