Got a full laptop? Two lean ideas...

All our devices can get bloated from time to time. However, I have found a couple of awesome ways to keep devices leaner without too much effort or technical knowledge being required.

The first is the free Google photos app. All my devices are connected to my Google photos account, so whenever an image, graphic or video is saved to my PC, my phone, or my laptop, they are also transferred into the cloud. What is also fantastic is that I have unlimited storage space! I keep everything and delete NOTHING from the cloud. All I do is that once I have checked my Google images account to ensure that transfer has happened, I can safely delete what is on whichever device is starting to clog up. I can then transfer any image, graphic or video to whichever device I need it on. We can get Google photos in the Playstore for our phones, or at https://photos.google.com/apps. Too easy.

The second is WinDirStat. This freeware looks at our disc usage statistics, and helps we Windows users clean up. We can download, install and run the freeware at https://windirstat.net/. This software lets us see our HDD showing the size of our files (très cunning) in a "treemap" which the creators say "represents each file as a colored rectangle, the area of which is proportional to the file's size". We can look for bloat in our file storage areas and do a bit of judicious pruning. Not our systems folders, obviously, but in our file folders if we have bloat... or in our video files. Then all we need to do is to use Google photos, and delete what is on our HDDs.

Hope these suggestions help!


Sam