Q: I just found out, and I'm in complete shock. I always thought a decent computer/laptop had to have about 160 g at least. Am I reading wrong, or is it truly possible that i only have 16.9 gig? And I always found space for everything, the computer has never been slow, had like 1000 songs and hours of video, tons of pics (I'm a photoshop geek). I don't understand how it's possible.
A: Very possible, and if it "only" has a 20GB unit (17 after formatting and partitioning) it's so not ancient. If you can believe it, my first new PC had .34 gigabytes of space, and I own a PC with a .02 gigabyte drive. See, hard disk space doubles about every 18 months, so 20 million bytes was normal in 1988, 200 million bytes was typical in 1993, 2 billion bytes was standard by 1996-1997, and 20 million bytes was common by 2001-2002. Now, 85$ buys 640 billion bytes. Ain't technology grand? Also, Photoshop files only take up about twenty megabytes in PSD format even for something cavernous, A song takes 3MB, and a feature-length film consumes about 700MB. That's how! Leave a few gigabytes open and all will be okay. Computers run awful when you use up that last ten percent on the boot drive.