Harddrive Overload!

[Bison]

I decided to do some hard drive clean up and uninstall some programs and games that I don't use any more, wow is all I can say.  I've got a 500 GB hard drive on the laptop.  Usually I like to keep a minimum of 200 GB free for page caching and crazy tinfoil hat ideas I have about start up and game playing slow downs due to an over packed hard drive.  Anyway I was down to 160 GB.  I deleted about 8 games and freed up a bunch of space. 

The crazy thing that hit me was just that the average game sized for AAA titles is 10-20 GB and non-AAA titles seem to run 2-5 GB.  4 or 5 years ago 500 GB would have been a nice large hard drive.  Now days I guess I should have know that 1 TB is the minimum to go. 

I've got a few more titles on the cutting block.  My new theory is that as one game goes on then one must come off.  If I don't play a game for 3-4 months it moves to the top of the cue, I know myself well enough that I'll never go back and play it. 

Just a random event in my life.  Boring and yet so very awesome to me; the geek. 

[Nefaro]

They suck up a lot don't they?

I often have problems deciding which ones to axe, to make space, knowing that I'll probably want to fire one of those up in the next month or two right after I uninstall it.  ;D

[Jack Nastyface]

Disk space is amazingly cheap.  I have over 500 CD's in my collection, and when I burned then to digital (192 Mb freq) I could store the entire collection on one the larger size thumb drives.   In contrast to these modern behemoths, one of my favorite "early" games was Chuck Yeager's Air combat.  That entire game took up less than 1.44 Mb.

[Keunert]

that was very touching Bison.

[Bison]

that was very touching Bison.

Haven't changed the douche water lately, eh?

[Keunert]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P_5EWjVNr4

[LongBlade]

Actually, Bison, that's been the cycle for a long time. It slowed somewhat when Consoles Ruled The Earth (or started to) but there was a time when PC gaming was the only real gaming available, and then it was much more common for hardware to become both outdated and hard drives to fill up much faster.

It is funny how much clutter they fill up with even without games.

And thanks for the reminder - I just checked my HDD and it's about 75% full. Probably time for me to unload some games, too.

[bayonetbrant]

I always thought hard drives only came in one size: full

[Slick Wilhelm]

Usually I like to keep a minimum of 200 GB free for page caching

If you have a goodly amount of RAM on that laptop, you could speed the system up by deleting that SWAP cache on the hard drive.

Anytime the system swaps out to the cache instead of using RAM = s-l-o-w-n-e-s-s.

[Nefaro]

Usually I like to keep a minimum of 200 GB free for page caching

If you have a goodly amount of RAM on that laptop, you could speed the system up by deleting that SWAP cache on the hard drive.

Anytime the system swaps out to the cache instead of using RAM = s-l-o-w-n-e-s-s.

Actually it's even slower when the computer tries to use virtual memory, and there isn't much alotted to it in Windows.   It has to delete some of it before writing to it and continuing on.. so it's even slower if you don't have much allocated for that use.

I set mine manually so Windows doesn't try to adjust it all the time.  I think it's set to 4 or 6 GB right now, even though it never uses much at all.  Just gotta be sure if, for some odd reason, something overflows my memory a lot that I get the least amount of slowdown from it.

[Bison]

I need to look into my memory usage.