Purpose: Ensuring Room for Essential Software

To ensure your computer can reliably run the operating system, business applications, and future updates, we perform health checks on all of our devices. The “Storage Capacity” check verifies that your computer’s main storage drive (its hard drive) is large enough to meet modern requirements.

This is a fundamental check to ensure your device has enough room for Windows 11 and the tools you need to do your job.

How it Works: The Size of Your Digital Filing Cabinet

Think of your computer’s storage drive as its digital filing cabinet.

It’s important to distinguish between two different things:

1. Free Space: This is how many empty drawers you have left.
2. Storage Capacity: This is the total size of the entire filing cabinet itself.

A small filing cabinet will fill up quickly and won’t have room for the new, larger folders required by modern software like Windows 11.

This health check does not look at your free space. It measures the total, physical size of the filing cabinet to see if it meets the minimum standard (at least 64 GB for a standard PC, or a larger 256 GB for an AI-ready Copilot+ PC).

What Your Results Mean

The check determines if your computer’s hard drive is large enough for today’s needs.

Status	What It Means	What To Do
PASS	Sufficient Storage Capacity Your computer’s storage drive is large enough to accommodate the operating system and our standard business applications.	No action is required. Your device meets the size requirement.
ACTION REQUIRED(Fail)	Insufficient Storage Capacity The storage drive in your computer is too small to reliably run modern software. It will not have enough space for Windows 11 and its required updates.	This cannot be fixed with a software update.The drive size is a physical hardware limitation. Please contact the IT Help Desk immediately to schedule a device replacement.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my drive size a problem now? It has enough free space.

• Windows 11 and modern applications require significantly more space than older versions. Even if your small drive has free space now, it won’t be enough to handle future mandatory updates and software installations, which can cause the system to fail.

Can you just install a bigger hard drive in my computer?

• In most modern laptops, the storage drive is an integrated component that is not easily replaced. To ensure system reliability, the standard and most effective solution is to replace the entire device with one that meets current specifications.

Why is the requirement higher for a Copilot+ PC?

• The advanced AI features of Copilot+ PCs, like instant search and on-device assistants, require very large data models to be stored locally. This requires a significantly larger “filing cabinet” (at least 256 GB) to function.