<p>How much free memory do you need going into college? Is 40 GB enough?</p>
<p>That entirely depends on what you plan on storing on your computer’s hard drive. You could always get an external hard drive too. You won’t need much at all for your notes or class related things but if you plan on taking 300 pictures a day and storing those as well as a huge itunes library and tons of downloaded movies, 40GB isn’t going to cut it. It’s entirely dependent on what you plan on storing on it.</p>
<p>First of all, that’s not memory, it’s storage.</p>
<p>Secondly, 40 GB is plenty as long as you are not storing large quantities of videos or large programs (modern games, for example). Music, pictures, office documents, text, etc… should all fit in without any problem.</p>
<p>Also, as mainphi mentioned, you can get external hard disks if you ever feel constrained by your built-in capacity (you can get a 500 GB Western Digital drive from Best Buy for $90, for example).</p>
<p>you can get a 1TB drive from newegg for about $100 now so that 500GB from bestbuy might not be such a great deal ;)</p>
<p>As for 40GB, it’s not a lot, but it should be enough for light use. Of course, if you want to install a bunch of software, store a bunch of videos and pictures and music, etc. That might not be a good idea, but there’s always the external HDD as someone mentioned. </p>
<p>Or if you are feeling adventurous, laptop harddrives are also pretty cheap. If you know how to image your harddrive, it should be easy to switch out the old drive and put a newer, bigger one in without the need for reinstallation, file transfers, etc.</p>
<p>I have an external and I just upgraded my internal HD to 160GB. External is for back up. I’m not lugging it around. That’s why I upgraded.</p>
<p>I have a 500 GB external (same one I mentioned) that I got to store the huge amounts of anime and movies I have. I decided to back up most of my stuff so long as I had all that empty space, though. As a plus, my roommate had a bunch of video files he was willing to share with me, so I was able to put them in my external ^.^</p>
<p>My internal (for my old Toshiba) has 100 GB. I dedicated 10 of them to an Ubuntu partition, so right now it only has 90 GB. About 15.4 of those are free, but then again I have lots of stuff.</p>