What's a "good" amount of free space to have on a hard drive?

Question

I have about 3.7 GB right now.
Should I try to clear out more space or is that a normal amount?

Answer 1

Matters if you think you need more space. Right now I wouldnt worry about clearing out more space. If you constantly add music/pictures/movies to your hard drive, then it can fill up kind of fast and you may need some more room.

As for what the person above me said. I agree that adding RAM is important to improving the performance of your computer. However, having extra hard drive space wont improve your performance. Having 1GB of free space compared to 500GB makes no difference in your computers speed for the most part. The system, does use your hard drive for some things to improve performance, but most of that is already taken into account when you checked how much space you had.

Answer 2

I would say keep a good 10 gb free. that way, if you want to move large amounts of pictures or songs around you can. Also, windows or mac uses a large amount of the hard drive to save information about the system such as preferences or such. also, i recommend that you buy a larger hard drive so you have 20 gb free or so. the two most effective upgrades for your computer are 1) RAM and 2) Storage (Hard drive) so the more you have the better.

Answer 3

3.7 ?.....u need atleast a 40 gig hard drive if u are using windows xp and plan on saving anything.....i would recommend going out and buying a used/new ..80 to a 160 gig hard drive
if i had 3.7..i could not even tun my pc on.....actually it sounds as if u are ready for a new pc
i just bought a compaq laptop with vista home edition
1 gb ram
80 gb hard drive
intel graphics mediaaccelator
for 499.00

Answer 4

For best performance and reliability, try to keep whatever size drive you have at no more than 50% capacity. It's not about gigabytes free, it's more about percentage of space utilized.