While counseling a customer on buying a new computer recently, the customer asked if a 500 gigabyte drive was ok compared to another a computer that had a 640 GB hard drive. Other than hard drive capacity, the machines were pretty equal. Unless the person plans to store their 2000 album music collection, edit feature length movies, or are designing the next skyscraper for Dubai, I have them go through this simple exercise:
- Double-click My Computer
- RIGHT Click the Hard drive icon (usually designated as the C drive)
- Click Properties
When the pie chart appears, I ask them to tell me what the total capacity of the drive is (in the woman’s case I was helping today, it was 20 GB), then I ask them to tell me how much of the drive is being used (the blue part of the chart and in this woman’s case it was 8 GB). Then I ask them how long they have used the computer and in her case it was 6 or 7 years.
The demonstration solidifies the answer for them and will for you too if you need to decide what kind of hard drive capacity is needed when buying a new computer.
