laptop memoy vs. flash drive

[howdoesit]

I have a laptop with about 3/4 of it's memory full. Whats better, to buy more memory and have it installed or buy a flash drive and use it?

[rojash]

3/4 is a meaningless measure. 1/4 of 250 GB is a lot, 1/4 of 10 GB is not much at all.
You also don't mention what kind of stuff you want to save. Flash Drives are ideal for transporting data, but for additional storage (photos, music, etc) an external USB hard drive is a much better option.

[heathfield]

Agree with Rojash, except it's not the laptop memory that we're all talking about, but its hard drive storage space.

[Ethel]

You have choices - buy a larger hard drive; buy an external hard drive; back up photos, documents, music to cd, dvd or flash drives and make more space by deleting unnecessary programs.

[vehelpfulguy]

I think you are confusing memory types here.

A computer has 2 main types of memory

1) REAL MEMORY (or RAM) - this is only used when the laptop is running. When the laptop is turned off it becomes empty.

2) HARD DISK MEMORY - this is where all your programs, personal files etc are stored. The information on this memory remains even when the computer is turned off.

My guess is that it is your HARD DISK memory is 3/4 full, so adding more RAM memory will not help this at all.

You could replace the HARD DISK with a larger hard disk, but that would mean a complete reinstall of Windows and all your programs.

As other have said, buy an external hard drive. This plugs in your USB port and is very easy to setup and use.

Here is an example of one.

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=2 17655&source=1&DOY=2m5

[vehelpfulguy]

more...

If you hard disk memory is 3/4 full the other option is to delete some files off it.

1) If there are files you no longer want or need then just delete them (then empty the recycle bin)

2) If there are files you want to keep then copy them to a CD or DVD and THEN delete them off your hard drive.

Usually the largest types of files are video or movie files, so if there are some of those you can delete that will free up loads of space.

You can use the "Search" option in Windows to find the largest files on your computer (search for "Files an Folders" by Size).

This may help you find some large files you had forgotton about.