How to Quickly Free up Space on Your Windows PC
Windows: the concept of ” spring cleaning ” terrifies me. Organizing your archives of material – physical or digital – is much easier as a year-round activity than on one awful day (or days) when there is a lot of time outside and you prefer to do something else.
Fortunately, it’s incredibly easy to see if you’re wasting precious space on your computer, a practice that sounds incredibly silly but worth every gigabyte saved if you don’t have that much free space on your desktop or laptop drive to start with. with.
I do not set myself an annual reminder of this; I just have the feeling that I haven’t studied the contents of my disks for a long time. And I am always amazed at the results; an erroneous file or strange folder can save up to several gigabytes. And even if that’s not a huge percentage of the 500GB solid state drive I use as my primary drive, it makes me feel like I’ve done something in a day, which is priceless.
There are many methods you can use to get rid of digital junk on your laptop or desktop, but there are two that I prefer to focus on: the “automatic” method and the “manual” method.
Let Windows do the work for you
Click the “Start” button and type “Disk Cleanup”. Download the utility and your operating system will immediately ask you which drive you want to scan. Select one and click OK.
In a very short amount of time, Windows will report several different measurements, including:
- How much space your temporary internet files are taking up
- How much is in your Downloads folder
- How much data is in your cart
- How full is your “Temp” folder in Windows
If you click “Clean up system files” and re-scan the disk, you get a few extra measurements. These include Windows updates that the operating system automatically saves to your disk “just in case,” as well as temporary files left over from any Windows installation you might have performed.
In other words, click that button, take a look at the overall results, and see how much space you can save if your operating system deletes files you no longer need. This is a quick and easy way to save a few gigabytes or more.
Use an app that shows you the biggest space idlers on your drive
I already talked about this utility, but I think that WizTree is a must for any Windows PC. You don’t even need to install anything to use it. Take the portable version, run the 32-bit or 64-bit executable file, select the drive, and click the Scan button. After a few seconds – three for my SSD and four for my hard drive – you’ll get a list of all your PC’s parent folders, sorted by how much space they take up on your hard drive.
If you dig deeper, you get the same treatment for any folders in the watched folders. This allows you to quickly dig and find the folders with the most data on your computer. You may not be able to do anything with this information (for example, if you know that the Videos folder is full of content), but WizTree can also help you find special folders full of things you forgot about – in my In the case, 9GB of Skyrim mods that I had no idea about were still buried on my main drive, not on the game drive.
I also love that WizTree can show you which file types are taking up the most space in any folder, which can help you determine if there should be something somewhere – for example, tons of .TMP files in a folder or .MKV. which you accidentally copied to the Pictures folder in addition to the Videos folder. You can even use the File View tab to see the worst free space violators in any folder.
WizTree is free to use and is one of the fastest disk analysis tools out there. I’ve loved it since hearing about it last year and has since helped me save gigabytes of space. This tool and the built-in Windows Disk Cleanup tool take almost no time to start up and will make your computer feel fresh and free as much as it takes for lunch.