A very silly but useful hack I did to get the MS flight sim install down to about 40GB (normally ~270GB) before I gave up on windows was this.

Set up a nextcloud server on a raspberry pi.

Install the client on your windows machine.

Add your games install folder as a connection on the nextcloud client and enable VFS (virtual filesystem)

Once synced, right click the folder and select “free up space…”

This will basically delete the file data from your local machine and redownload it whenever windows tries to access a file.

Now launch your game and it’ll take a while to start as it has to redownload the files it actually needs to run, but it won’t bother getting it doesn’t have to.

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I recommend swapping in a new SSD . Use something like clonezilla to mirror the SSD from the old one to the new.

Also see whether you can bump the RAM in that box: laptops often have a LOT of junk that starts on boot that just seems to eat RAM, not the least of which is Windows itself. Adding RAM will have the most immediate effect once you’ve found the space to install things.

Reinstall Windows and then debloat it. Here’s a guide from AtlasOS. I recommend it to all my friends who have just bought a new laptop. I have no complaints from them. Windows Updates, Defender, Microsoft Store work as expected.

hp is notorious for pre installing apps that you dont need, it’s called bloatware. you can maybe remove some of those.

The hard drive may be 256gb but a big chunk of that is taken up by Windows and also there will be a hidden recovery partition. So 170gb sounds about right. You can’t reduce how much space windows takes, and the recovery partition is worth keeping in case you get in to trouble.

There may be programs HP have installed that you can remove in add/remove software to make a bit more space. HP is notorious for bliatware - installing things to try and sell you stuff. Probably a good few gb may be that crap.

If you download a big game, then it’s not a big deal if you’re using that game. 80gb is still plenty. And you can delete the game when you’re done and use that 90gb for something else.

256gb isn’t much but it’s enough unless you want multiple big games installed or have a big library of data such as movies or pictures.

Also it may be possible to upgrade the hard drive - depends on the model and how accessible the hard drive is. If you can access the hard drive to replace it then you could get a 1tb drive for example. There are guides online but basically you’d need to copy the existing drive to the new drive (would need a USB adaptor to mount the new drive first) and then swap the drives round. It very much depends on the laptop though.

Another option is an external hard drive connected via USB - it’s not good for gaming or running big programmes but it is fine for storing movies and pictures.

If the priority is to have multiple different big games installed at the same time, then upgrade the hard drive. Most HP models it’s generally doable without much fuss. More difficult with the ultra slim devices though. Search for your model online and see what people have done.

Tbh I thought this was a shitpost trying to get people to Linux

You obviously need to download more RAM.

Ram and (ssd) storage are two different things. Storage space is the one relevant to this question. Also, both of those numbers, 8 gb of ram and 256 gb of disk space, are very low these days.

If you’re using the laptop with the software it came with, it might have a bunch of demo versions of useless apps as advertisements. HP is (or at least used to be) notorious for this crap. Somewhere in the settings should be an apps page that lists what’s installed, check there.

If you downloaded the game illegally then installed it on your hard drive then… You have your answer.

You might still have the downloaded game and you have the installed game. Depending on the fiability of your download source there might also be temporary install file, somewhere.

linux

Cant you upgrade the laptop? Would you share the model?

Clean install without the HP bloat, backup the important stuff elsewhere first.

Another thing: Are you subscribed to a bajillion mods? That is the case for me. My CoD Black Ops 3 is 30GB, with DLC is 90GB, after Steam workshop mods is 377 GB.

You can get a terabyte SSD for like $50 these days. It might be worth it to just upgrade.

Lots of people commenting about the laptop here, so let me offer something different. What’s that one game you downloaded? Because if it is Ark: Survival Evolved (or Ascended) then still having 80G left is pretty good!

Probably just a lot of bloatware. When I’ve been in this situation in the past, I did a completely fresh install of windows. Much smaller. Linux can free up even more space.

There really isn’t anything necessary from HP, but it also depends a lot on your comfort working with the computer so ymmv. I don’t know what’s gonna happen if 3 months down the line you need to call customer support for something. If it were me, I’d be thinking “worst case scenario I can just factory reset”, especially if I had everything important backed up somewhere.