How much space does minecraft take up on your laptop?

Installing Programs does not slow a PC down. Loading and Running too many at once will.
Minecraft is a small program. No problem.

It doesn't matter how much it takes up, it's a stupid game and it's a waste of time.

Minecraft only uses around 200MB of storage space which is basically nothing.
Texture mods and game mods can take up a little bit of space, but id say maybe a GB or less if you have a lot.

By default minecraft only uses like 500MB of ram or less. Once you start modding it can take 2GB or more.

Your computer slows down in like 1 of 2 ways.

1) your hdd is more then like 80% full. The way your hdd works is its a spinning disc and there's a read head which moves from the center of the platter to the outside. The further outside you go the longer it has to take to search for the data since the platter is largest near the edge. So anything on the edge of the platter will take MUCH longer to read or write data to.
Once you start putting things on there which are related to your operating system and software and games it can slow your pc down (defragmenting your hdd can help this problem quite a lot)

To keep this from happening, just use something like ccleaner to remove temporary files from your pc maybe a few times a month. And then defragment your hdd like once a month (or after you install/add a ton of things to your hdd).

Then don't just needlessly keep a ton of stuff on your hdd. Uninstall and delete things when you don't need them.

Getting an SSD fixes this problem all together. Running windows from an SSD will make everything very fast and snappy. They are expensive however.

2) your cpu or ram is at or near 100% usage. When your cpu is already under very high load, its already completing tasks for other processes. If you give it more processes to handle it obviously won't be able to handle those processes til it finises processing other processes. Thus creating delay, and "slow" down the processes you are trying to run at the time.

so if you are trying to play a game at the same time as rendering a 1080P+ video in adobe premiere, both processes will be slow lol.

So your computers performance relies a lot on your cpus performance. As the better the cpu, the faster/better tasks will run, aswell as the more tasks you can run simultaneously.

(set your laptop to the "high performance" power plan to make sure your cpu can run at full speed. Thus will use more battery if you are not plugged in)

Ram works kind of the same way. Once you run out of ram, it will push things to your hdds paging file/virtual memory. Your hdd is 100x slower then your ram, so when that happens, you get a HUGE loss of performance.

so basically if you use up all your ram, everything will start getting slow, freezing, etc.

every thing you have running will use some ram. So if you open itunes, there's 500MB of ram use. Then you open a web browser with 10 tabs and some addons, there's 1GB of ram, windows will use like 1GB of ram. Then you open skype there's another few hundred MB of ram.

if you like to have many things running at the same time, more ram is beneficial. But know having more ram then you will ever use does NOT help performance. If you say always use 4GB of ram, and you buy 64GB of ram. You are only using 4/64. It would be the same as using 4/8 or 4/6. You only lose performance when you run out of ram to use.

once you close the program it stops using ram, so close things you don't need if you are coming close to hitting your ram cap. (modern os are actually pretty good at handling ram allocation)