Is the clutter on your hard drive driving you crazy? Are you struggling to find disk space for new software or a game? Don’t worry! We’ve posted a bunch of easy solutions to free up your hard drive. Though the new-age SSD drives run at greater speeds they offer much lesser than the traditional SATA drives. A little space is all we need to store those memorable photos or important documents on our computer. In this article, we’ve rounded up 5 tricks to help you recover space on your hard drive. We’ve covered the ways to delete the junk files, browser cache, uninstalling the unnecessary programs, deleting the duplicate files etc. Let’s jump in right away!
1. Use Disk Cleanup to Delete Temp Files.
Windows is a sophisticated operating system with a bunch of super-useful utilities. Disk cleanup is one such utility which helps to free up your hard drive space by deleting the temporary files that are stored in your computer.
Instructions to Remove Temp Files using Disk Cleanup
Step 1: Click on Start.
Step 2: Type “Disk cleanup” in the search box. Click on the first result.
Step 3: In Disk Cleanup, select the drive. Example: C: Drive. Click on OK. Hit the Cleanup System Files button.
It takes a few minutes to clean up all the temporary files on the drive you have selected.
Also read:- How to use System Restore in Windows 10?
2. Uninstall Software
The large portion of the disk space on many computers is occupied by programs and games. If there are any software or programs on your computer that you no longer use, it’s a good idea to uninstall them to free up the hard disk space.
Here are the instructions to uninstall or remove the unwanted software and programs on Windows 10.
Step 1: Click on the Start button. Click on Control Panel and then go to Uninstall a program.
Step 2: You’ll see a list of programs that are installed on your computer. Go through them and select the ones that you no longer need.
Step 3: After selecting the programs, click on the Uninstall button.
Tip: Click the Size header to sort the programs by file size to know the programs that occupy the huge hard drive space on your computer.
Also read:- How To Speed up Performance Of Your Windows 10 PC
3. Delete Duplicate Files
If you use advanced professional software like Adobe Photoshop or any other video editor programs, there is a chance that your computer has accumulated lots of duplicate files over time. These duplicate files are not essential and occupy too much space on the hard drive. Windows do not offer any utility to track these duplicate files and delete them at one shot. Fortunately, there are a couple of duplicate file finder tools that can list out all the duplicate files on Windows computer.
4. Truly Delete the Trash
Whatever file we delete on Windows goes straight away to the Recycle Bin. But it is not yet deleted permanently on your computer and still takes up hard disk space. You have to Empty the Recycle Bin time to time to make sure that the trash is not consuming the space. Just right-click on Recycle Bin and click on Empty Recycle Bin and it deletes all the trash. Keep in mind that you cannot recover the files if they are permanently deleted from the Recycle Bin.
5. Use Third-Party Programs for Cleaning Temporary Files
Windows OS has an in-built temporary file cleaner program called Disk Cleanup. We’ve covered it in the 2nd point on this article. However, it doesn’t clean up all the temporary files, especially that of third-party software like browser cookies and cache. Cleaning up the web browser cache and cookies rejuvenates the browser and improves the speed. We need to use the third-party programs to clean up all the temporary files.
CCleaner is one of the popular third-party software for Windows OS to clean up all the unnecessary stuff.
Wrapping up…
That’s all you need to do to free up some space on your hard drive. The little extra space always comes handy especially if you want to save something important. We hope that our tips have helped you to increase the hard disk space on your Windows computer. If you know any other tips to clean disk space, please let us know via the comment section below.