Recently more and more problems have come up in the computer system, though many are unknown, a repeating problem which could probably be easily fixed is the space requirement issue. Each computer has a limited HDD (Hard disk drive) space often lying between 50 to 1000 gigabytes, or one terabyte. On many of the computers in the more used computer labs, the hard drives are filled with programs needed on each computer such as the operating system and other programs such as word, Java, Internet explorer and so on. As the hard drive space on many computers is under 250 gigabytes, these spaces fill up quickly, especially when updates, which may come out at any time are downloaded but not installed. This downloading of update files leads to sometimes up to three gigabytes of space being required by the theoretically temporary files that are present until the file is installed, and the download and install files are automatically deleted. The majority amount of update files come from Microsoft. These updates coming from companies such as Oracle, Adobe, and Microsoft are not in fact to add features, but often to protect against software exploits. such as the recent breach in Adobe’s system which resulted in large amounts of user data to be easily accessible to those who could exploit the breach. These updates also take up space and are often impossible to delete as temporary files without thorough knowledge of computer and administrative rights and sometimes the installation of third party programs to do the deleting.

An easy fix to space issues on individual computers would be to let the program update themselves thus saving the space that would otherwise be held for temporary files; much of the temporary files are files that are already present, and are just used to make sure there aren’t any damaged files within the program being updated. Another step would be to not allow users to save things directly to the computer, but rather save them to the dreaded (H:) drive, which also suffers from space issues.

Currently the (H:) drive is about six gigabytes,  and is constantly filled to the brim with date from different users. This could be easily fixed by buying a cheap HDD the size of one terabyte, and making this accessible to the network, making it easy for all users to have their own space which could easily amount to one gigabyte per student. This hasn’t happened, for reasons unknown, and thus should be considered as a method for easily fixing the space issue on computers throughout the school.