When I used a desktop and stayed in one place, I had no problem I set the backup program to handle outlook and password keeper every day, other things on regular basis week and little portables were a weekly event while I did my bill paying. Then i used my laptop in the same way. I plugged in at the desk, connected drives and kept the same routine. Simple and easy.
But those days are gone. My life is more complicated now. I go back and forth between 2 homes on an irregular basis. These days I use a laptop, and none of the drives is attached to the laptop 100% of the time.
Unless I want to take my little portables AND the dock with large heavy 2TB drive, cords with me every time I travel I can not set it for a specific day/hour because I do not know which day I will be in which house. My "habit" is broken. So I must build new habits.
The laptop gets VERY SLOW and has windows problems/lockups, generally cranky if my free space gets less than 110 GB. (The drive is only 451GB total). As long as I stay above 110 GB, its ok. And if I stay above 120 GB the system is quick and runs lovely. So I am constantly dumping things off my machine, and moving things onto portables for reference. I can not run XARA program when I have less than 110GB free.
I bought this in June of 2010, stretched for as much as I could afford since it was replacing my desktop unit and would be a work horse for me for years. Negotiated some good price breaks by going UP to a gaming system and dropping the specs down to work system and using a personal rep to buy it. NEVER thought I would run into a problem with it being "FULL" when it has 120GB free! It's crazy but a fact of life on this Dell XPS 16 system. My system was discontinued for known OVERHEATING problems. It gets VERY hot to the touch.
- Intel Core i7 720QM 1.6GHz (2.8 GHz Turbo Mode, 6MB Cache)
- 8GB, DDR3, 1333MHz 2 Dimm
- ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 - 1GB
- 500GB 7200RPM Free Fall Sensor Seagate Hard Drive (450GB useable)
- Win7 Ultimate 64