Leave about 5 percent of free space on your hard disk

Leave about 5 percent of free space on your hard disk

It seems odd to have space on a hard disk that you should not use, but free space is used for temporary files, setup files, expanding your swap file, etc.... Space that is usually freed up again automatically, but it has to be there. With a hard disk of 10 GB and 5 MB of free space, a standalone Windows computer will not run well.

If you have more than one partition, the 5% rule goes for the partition with the operating system and potentially for partitions with programs and applications. A pure data partition can do without this rule, but you can prevent space problems by not saving anything, or not much, in the root of the partition. (This means that if you have a D:\ partition for saving data, you should not save your document to just D:\, but to a folder on D:\. The advice, by the way, goes for your C:\ drive.)