As the trend toward downloadable content continues, moreover, conserving hard-drive space will eventually become a challenge, he said.

What bit rate will yield something close to CD sound quality without taking up vast amounts of hard-drive space?

Deleting unnecessary files and programs to clear off some hard-drive space could also help the defragmentation process.

Offline favorites take up hard-drive space, and it may take the browser several minutes to download fresh copies.

That four-minute track can easily occupy 6.5 megabytes of hard-drive space.

Microsoft's new operating system is physically big, requiring two gigabytes of hard-drive space and more than an hour to install.

Aperture's nondestructive editing system also consumes far less hard-drive space over time.

This is a much lighter-weight program, needing far less RAM and hard-drive space.

A movie will need about 1 gigabyte of hard-drive space and will take an hour or two to download using a high-speed Internet connection.

The image files will also take up considerably less hard-drive space than photos scanned at higher resolutions.