Need more space.... HELP!!

[Level_Seven_Paladin]

Ok, I just got a laptop (5 GB space) a month ago and have been putting alot of things on my computer.... pics, articles, aniamtions, etc. Well, Im VERY low on space now and need help.

I was wondering about this aditional Hard-drive that I saw, I hear that you can add it to your computer and will have more space, would 50 GB be good? Could I get more than that?

 

[trunks2k]

Ok. You have a laptop. This makes things a bit more complicated than it should be.

Laptops are not standardized. So if you want to buy a new internal hard drive, you need to be sure that your laptop will support it. Plus, I wouldn't put in an internal hard drive yourself in a laptop if you aren't too sure as to what you are doing. PCs are a different story.

That said, if you can find and install an internal hard drive for your laptop, great. 50GB should be plenty for you as long as you don't have a large amount of video files. I had 100GB space total on my PC and I had filled it up, mostly with various video files. I now have 120GB total, but almost 80GB free because my old HD died.

Your only caveat is the OS. IIRC windows 98 only read up to a certain amount of hard drive space. I believe 50GB is well below that limit. More recent versions of windows don't have that issue.

You may also look towards an external hard drive. If you have a USB and/or Firewire connections on the laptop, an extrnal hard drive will work too. You just find one that will work with your connection. That way you keep the original 5GB but still have the extra space. You also won't have to worry about losing your original data. However, anexternal the drive isn't as portable. If you tend to keep the laptop in one place, it's fine. If you move around a lot, it won't be too advantageous.

The other bad thing about external hard drives is that they are much slower than internal hard drives. A USB bus is significantly slower than your IDE bus (the normal connection for internal hard drives); so reading and writing to the disk is much slower. A firewire bus is slower than IDE, but not really by too much. While there is a slow down on the read/write with an external firewuire hard drive, a good amount of people don't tend to notice it.

 

[QuePasa]

There is a limitation on how big a disk you can have with Windows 98 SE, and that is 32GB. There is an update for it that you can download from microsoft that will resolve that situation. This is only a problem with some versions of 98 SE. If 98 refuses to see that the disk is bigger than 32gig, then get the update.

Another limitation is on the Fat32 filesystem, and that is only with partitions, so if you get a hard disk bigger than that limit just break it up in to partitions. But the max on it is 2TB, that is 2000GB. Good luck going over that one :-D

 

[KristianJ]

What type of laptop do you have? That's gonna dictate what you can do in terms of upgrades. I think maybe getting an external hard drive might not be worth it if you don't have a USB 2.0 connection, which considering the size of your current HDD is unlikely, or a PCMCIA card with USB 2.0 ports. If it's compatible, I'd just buy a new 2.5' drive (30GB is what I have and it's plenty for what I need) and use your existing drive inside an aluminium casing for backup. Check out the website of your laptop's manufacturer too...Dell's community forums have been very very handy when it comes to finding out how I can upgrade my laptop. And I'm pretty sure that HP/Compaq, Acer, IBM, etc. would have forums too.

 

[Level_Seven_Paladin]

LOL Thanks everyone..... glad I took a computer concepts class last quarter or I wouldnt know what you all were talking about.

There are a few things Im unclear on though, I know this may sound silly but what is a USB and/or Firewire connection?

BTW, I have a Dell, I'll come back with what type it is..... Im not even sure how old it is.

 

[trunks2k]

LOL Thanks everyone..... glad I took a computer concepts class last quarter or I wouldnt know what you all were talking about.

There are a few things Im unclear on though, I know this may sound silly but what is a USB and/or Firewire connection?

BTW, I have a Dell, I'll come back with what type it is..... Im not even sure how old it is.

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. IIRC this was used initially by Apple to start to standardize connections to peripheral devices like printers, scanners, etc. Several years ago, before USB became popular, there were different connections for different peripherals, and those ports were not expandable without buying a pretty expensive switch in which you manually changed which device the computer is to use. This was expensive, complex, and just annoying. USB allows all peripheral devices to have the same connection. Not only that, but USB is also easily expandable. For about $20 you can buy an external USB hub which will turn 1 USB port into 4 that can be used at the same time (at a sacrifce of speed). And even beyond that, USB is faster than the older serial connections. There are currently 2 versions of USB, 1.0 and 2.0. A 2.0 port is much faster than a 1.0 port and it can still support a 1.0 USB wire. A USB port on your computer is a small rectangle, about half inch by a quarter inch, they usually come in pairs, so there should be two right next to eachother or on top of eachother.

Firewire, again initially used extensively by Apple, is somewhat similar to USB. The biggest difference is that firewire is much faster. It's used more often for scanners and digital cameras (especially digital video cameras). There is a developing competition between USB and Firewire. Firewire is significantly faster than USB 1.0, but USB 2.0 is not too far behind. I believe there is a new version of Firewire coming out soonish that is supposed to be a lot faster than USB 2.0.

Almost all modern peripherals support USB and use USB by default. Some support both USB and Firewire, a lot of external drives support both. Others support only firewire - these tend to be memory and transfer intensive items like digital video cameras and external drives.


Now, whether or not your laptop supports these, it depends. Given the size of your HD, it indicates that it is very old, and likely will not support firewire or USB 2.0. It may support USB 1.0, look for the rectangles. If it doesn't, your laptop should have a PCMCIA slot to hook up external devices like a wireless card. You should be able to get a card with USB ports on it that will connect into the PCMCIA port. I believe there are also external hard drives that will connect into a PCMCIA port.

 

[doofus125]

LOL Thanks everyone..... glad I took a computer concepts class last quarter or I wouldnt know what you all were talking about.

There are a few things Im unclear on though, I know this may sound silly but what is a USB and/or Firewire connection?

BTW, I have a Dell, I'll come back with what type it is..... Im not even sure how old it is.

Can you give us the series and model # of your dell, I'll look it up and let you know what you are capable of doing with it.

 

[Ave Maria]

I'd have to recommend getting a good external hard drive. By the way, I would never recommend 5 gigs for any computer user regardless of whether they was using a laptop or not anymore. It used to be that 5 gigs was sufficient for most computer activites. Anymore 20 gigs is considered a bare minimum for most people. I have an 80 gig hard drive on my PC.