

Popular examples include SpaceSniffer, WinDirStat, TreeSize, SpaceMonger, FolderSizes and SequoiaView. There are dozens of free utilities that will do the job.

You can find out how much space you need by scanning the hard drive in your Acer laptop. You could carry 2TB in a purse without even noticing, though the price might put you off. However, they are a great way to store lots of data in a very small space. SD cards are relatively slow, so it’s not the best idea to use them for large programs. If you have gigabytes of photos or music files, you can move them to cheap SD cards – eg 32GB for £7 – and free up valuable SSD space. Second, SD memory cards have grown in capacity and fallen dramatically in price.

First, you can now store files in online drives such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive and access them when you need them. The changeover has been helped by two other factors. In fact, 128GB SSDs are now cheaper than internal 1TB HDDs (roughly £40 at retail), while some 256GB SSDs are not much more expensive. However, 128GB and 256GB SSDs are now affordable. This isn’t going to appear in a £350 laptop. Ideally, you’d just replace a 1TB HDD with a 1TB SSD, but even today, a good 1TB SSD can cost around £250. The current solution is to compromise by installing smaller – and therefore cheaper – SSDs.
