Advice On Best Hard Drive Set Up For Mum - Laptop

[joko]

my mum has an old laptop thats clogged up with crap & annoys her because it goes slow sometimes, but she wont clean it, or restart it - ever, or even restart her browser - i keep telling her she needs to & it will sort most of the issues, but shes 83 & gets exasperated at having to do stuff like that & then gets exasperated when it starts to lag etc

so im setting up one of my old laptops for her - which is a bit newer than hers but originally was on win7
its an ASUS X54C
ive upgraded it to win 10 & upgraded to ram to 12

it seems to be working ok at the moment

My question is - ive put in a 350gb hard drive - with is enough for her needs - she really only uses the internet on it - so no need for lots of space, she does store some photos & home videos on it, but they dont take up much room.
she doesnt use it for anything else - only internet - mainly emails, & selling on ebay, and a bit of basic browsing.

so the drive is partitioned basically in half - around 150gb each for C & D drives

C drive has OS on and is only using about 30-35gb now, with all necessary software installed - i know i need to give windows extra space to work at its best, but how much does it need? - given that she wont install anymore software - and even if she did, it'd be rarely & just something basic, so its not going to slowly fill up with software needing more space.

i use AIOMI partition assistant on my own laptops, so i was thinking to make C drive a little bit smaller just to give a little more storage - if she needs it

(im going to set all her libraries to store in D drive, so nothing she puts on it will go onto C drive)


its it worth me doing this? or should i leave as is and leave C drive with lots of empty space?

are there any benefits to leaving a lot of empty space on the OS drive?
will it help with the smooth running of the laptop in any way?
maybe increase speed?

thanks for any help :)

[Old_Geezer]

350G should be more than enough for near anyone.

One wonders why the old one was slow. Had it run out of disk space ?

I would not cram the system partition too much. I'd also leave libraries with the system drive.

[JimF]

Why did you partition the drive in the first place? Doing so will have no benefit on performance.

[SlackAlice]

Not really worth partitioning the drive, wil not improve the speed. Only reason you might want to partition the drive, would be to add a 'recovery' drive.

[Buenchico]

You seem to be doing everything that I wouldn't!

Firstly, the maximum RAM that's supported by the mainboard and processor on an Asus X54C is 8GB. Putting 12GB into it is just asking for trouble.

Then you appear to have installed a conventional hard drive into the machine, when the one big speed improvement that you could really give it is to install an SSD instead. I'd have gone for a 120GB model (which would be perfectly adequate), from Crucial, for just £22.79. I can see no reason whatsoever to partition the drive.

[joko]

its an old machine the drive is the one that was in it, and it was already partitioned - my question is not whether to partition the drive, its whether to make the existing OS partition smaller.

i have read in a few sources that putting the OS in a partition away from all your personal stuff means it doesnt have to access all of that stuff unless it needs to, that it works better because the rest of its own partition is mostly empty, and unless you specifically open up the D drive, or look for something in it, it does not get accessed at all during normal workings - its like having an empty machine save for the OS.

i have bought a couple of brand new machines that have been partitioned like this already. there must be some reason they choose to do that.

[Togo]

When the disc speed was slower and the boot up and recognition protocols were much slower it was realised that putting he "important" things on the outer, faster portion of a disc was a good idea. The most important being designated as your security. Now that disc speeds are so much faster, discs so much smaller, and now obsolete the partition has become almost redundant in any modern machine. I have not done on on a desktop or laptop after fitting both with hybrid hard drives.

[Togo]

You can clone an old hard drive onto hybrid or ssd without choosing the "keep the partition" option. Just copy all files and OS.