There are dozens of free utilities that will do the job. You can find out how much space you need by scanning the hard drive in your Acer laptop. You could carry 2TB in a purse without even noticing, though the price might put you off. However, they are a great way to store lots of data in a very small space. SD cards are relatively slow, so it’s not the best idea to use them for large programs. If you have gigabytes of photos or music files, you can move them to cheap SD cards – eg 32GB for £7 – and free up valuable SSD space. Second, SD memory cards have grown in capacity and fallen dramatically in price. First, you can now store files in online drives such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive and access them when you need them. The changeover has been helped by two other factors.

In fact, 128GB SSDs are now cheaper than internal 1TB HDDs (roughly £40 at retail), while some 256GB SSDs are not much more expensive. However, 128GB and 256GB SSDs are now affordable. This isn’t going to appear in a £350 laptop. Ideally, you’d just replace a 1TB HDD with a 1TB SSD, but even today, a good 1TB SSD can cost around £250.

The current solution is to compromise by installing smaller – and therefore cheaper – SSDs. SSDs are more responsive, but they are also much more expensive per gigabyte of storage space. The problem, as you have found, is the cost. The laptop industry is slowly changing from PCs with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) to ones with chip-based solid-state drives (SSDs). I have been advised by a friend in IT that 256GB is needed to run most modern computer programs. I’ve also looked at a Lenovo IdeaPad 330S with a Core i5-8250U, 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD for £579, which seems way too expensive for what I need. My local computer shop has an HP 250 G6 laptop with a Core i5-7200U, 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, for £425, which they said they could upgrade to 256GB in the future if needed. I want to go down the SSD route, but do I need 128GB or 256GB? I use a laptop for documents, photos, emails, Facebook etc, and some Excel stuff, hence the need for Microsoft Office. I need to replace an old 15.6in Acer Aspire laptop with a Core i3 processor.

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