My wife needs a new laptop. The old one is slow, which I attribute largely to its having a hard drive rather than a solid-state disk (SSD); Microsoft must know that we don't all have SSDs, but its software does not reflect that knowledge. The old one is also getting to be flaky, shutting itself down now and then at random, and reporting a low battery when plugged into the wall.
So the new laptop will have an SSD, but of what size? The most economical laptops seem to have 64 GB SSDs. On the one hand, that seems stingy, for the laptops issued at work have 238 GB SSDs. On the other hand, what would one install that takes up 64 GB? She's not going to download movies, install Visual Studio, etc.
This morning, while watching a patch not quite install, I had a look at the drive of the laptop I use, and found that it had 111 GB used out of 234 usable. In less than the two hours required for the patch installation to timeout, I was able to bring this down to 84 GB used. The largest files removed tended to be either installation programs, for programs now installed on the laptop or for packages on Linux servers, or else large database exports--I'm not sure why I used the laptop as the intermediary in moving database, but I did.
The 27 GB removed went easily, but I don't know that the 111 GB remaining could be easily pared down. I've used the laptop since March 2020. I have been reasonably prudent in what I installed: communications programs, emacs, Python, Oracle clients, GIMP, Git, and Go. Is 128 GB the minimum that one needs? Probably so, for her laptop has over 100 GB used also.
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