How's your hard disk? Big enough? Fast enough?
Too often we ignore our disks. The display we notice, of course, because we're always staring at it. The processor, we're well aware, is behind everything that happens.Disk is different. You need to think about it when you buy, in order to get a disk that's big enough and fast enough. And you need to think about it as you work, keeping it organized, defragmented, cleansed of viruses and backed-up. Finally, you must monitor its free space and add more disk before overfilling.
So how big should a disk be?
Floppies are stuck at 1.4 megabytes. Sure, a few people have 2.8-megabyte floppy drives and a very few oddballs have floptical drives that hold 20 megabytes, but you don't find software distributed on those, and you couldn't send files on one to a colleague because you can bet he or she wouldn't have one.
Hard disks are not so stuck. In fact, they're constantly growing. The first models held only 5 or 10 megabytes, but that was 20 times as much as the floppies of the day. And more important, the hard disks were many times faster than floppies for saving and providing information to the processor.
Today's hard disks on business computers start at 200 megabytes, both for PCs and Macs. A typical figure is 212 megabytes. You can buy home-computer systems with less, down to as little as 170 megabytes or even 130 or 80 megabytes. Powerful business systems boast 340, 424 or 540 megabytes.
Which is for you? Remember that your disk must hold: your system software (DOS, Windows, OS/2, whatever); your system extensions (Adobe Type Manager, networking); your fonts (if you do desktop publishing, this can add up to many megabytes); your programs (which range from less than a few megabytes each for utilities to as much as 15 megabytes each for Windows word processors and spreadsheets); your clip media (pictures, sounds, video - though if you have a CD-ROM drive you may get most of your clips from there and not have to keep them on the hard disk); temp files (many programs, and Windows itself, create temporary files as you work - and these can occupy many megabytes); virtual memory (to stretch what your RAM chips can do. Windows or the Macintosh can do this by stealing part of the disk and pretending it's RAM - this can take up 5 to 10 megabytes easily) and your files (the data bases, documents, images, presentations, reports and e-mail you create, store and search through).
My recommendations for disk space: If you use DOS or a Macintosh and stick to word processing, a 40-megabyte hard disk is enough. You can't buy a disk this small today, but you can live with such a disk if your work is simple and small.
If you use DOS or a Macintosh with a variety of programs, 80 to 120 megabytes will do.
If you use Windows just for word processing, start with 120 megabytes.
Windows and a variety of programs calls out for 200 megabytes.
If you work with sound or color images on Mac or PC, get 200 to 340 megabytes.
If you have a large data base or two, start at 340 megabytes.
If you work with CAD (Computer-Aided Design), get 400 megabytes.
And if you're into video at all, get 500 megabytes, Mac or PC.
But what about compression? Will that let you buy less disk?
These are utility programs that will automatically squish your programs and files when they're saved on disk, by using computer shorthand to represent redundant information within the file. DOS 6 even comes with a free compression utility. These utilities then automatically unsquish the programs and files again when you use them.
How much a program or file can be squished depends on what's in it. Programs don't squish much, because they have little redundant information; pictures squish a lot. On average you'll get 50 percent to 100 percent more disk space as the files squish to two-thirds or one-half of their original sizes.
But if you are buying a PC, get as much disk as you need, then maybe experiment with compression to make it even bigger.