I bought an HP Laptop with 8gb of Ram...and was suppose to be 256gb SSD. I downloaded one game and its all the way down to 80. Is there any free software to download to help?
When I first started it up it was 170gb is there anyway to get it to at least 200? And what can I get rid of on an HP laptop that won't screw it up?
Try a Linux install of something lightweight like mint/xfce to eliminate OS bloat.
Steam has a built in compatibility layer you can manage from your library page, so if your laptop could run a game on windows it should easily run it on mint with the spared resources and you'll have all that spare space from ditching windows crap.
Guy is asking if he can download free software to get more ssd space. And while TECHNICALLY Linux does fit the bill for this (and is awesome), I'm willing to wager OP does not have the technical skill set for it at this time.
Oh yeah, I don't think he's going to be doing that either. I think this is plain old uninstalling pre-installed HP stuff and hoping for the best kind of situation.
Mint is definitely at LEAST as easy to install as Windows, if not easier. As long as all the stuff on his laptop is supported out of the box. I love my Mint install, but last month I spent 40 minutes on github trying to find the right release of the open driver to work with my revision of network adapter, and the amount of work in the terminal was undoubtedly more than somebody asking this question would be comfortable with.
It's funny the biases that crop up in these threads. Another poster says to format the drive and reinstall windows with de-bloating software and that gets upvoted while probably being a more complex process than installing Linux.