How to Free Disk space on Windows PC

Suppose you are working on some project and in between, you suddenly get a message that you are running out of disk space. Then surely your reaction will be like, Oh! daam. This has to happen this time only! And you will feel stressed.

Though undoubtedly this is a stressful situation, however, this has never been a new problem for PC user. This is the reason that Windows has given us various options to free space by cleaning recycle bin, deleting temporary files, removing downloaded files, uninstalling the programs or games which we no more need.

Let’s discuss all the possible way of freeing disk space on windows:

Using Disc Clean Up:

1. Click Start on lower left side of your desktop. Locate and click on ‘Control Panel’ in the middle right side of the menu.                                        
2. In the coming up window, locate for the option, Administrative Tools and click on Free up Disk Space.

3. In the small window of Disk Cleanup that the select the drive you want to clean and click on OK.                                                                                                  
4. The system will check up the selected drive and will give the area of each category that can be freed, like:

• Downloaded Program Files
• Temporary Internet Files
• Recycle Bin
• Temporary File
• Thumbnails

Below that, you will get the total area you gain if you remove all the files as advised.

There is a button in the below right of the window to view the file in the selected category.

Uninstalling the programs:

It is better to uninstall the programs, which are no longer needed. You can go to the control panel and remove all the unwanted applications and programs.

• Open Control panel.
• Locate for the option, Programs
• Click on the next option, Uninstall a program. You will get a list of existing programs.
• Select the program you want to uninstall.
• As you select it, you will see ‘uninstall’ on the window bar. Click it.
• Now, it will be uninstalled only if you verify it in the new window that has come up.

Empty the Recycle Bin:

This is another method to free disk space. You can clear off the files residing in Recycle Bin. Recycle Bin contains all the data that you have deleted from your PC, but the system does not remove it permanently. That is why it occupies the disk space.

To remove this trash, click on Recycle Bin icon on your desktop. It will display all the file it has. Here, you have the option of clearing off all the files. You can also restore a file back to its original drive and folder if you need it. Click Empty Recycle Bin to clear it. You will be given a warning message asking if you want to delete the data permanently, click on the ‘Yes’ button to proceed.

Remove Temporary Files:

Temporary files are created by windows whenever you open any new program or file. Deleting them also saves lot of disk space. To clean temporary files:

• Click on start button and type ”%temp%” in search field.
• Now select all the files and pressing Ctrl+A and press Shift+Del to delete all the files.

To know the final disk space, you have two options:

• Right-click one of your hard drives in the computer window and select Properties. It will give you both, used space as well as free space.
• Use the keyboard shortcut. Press Windows key + E simultaneously. The coming window will let you know the exact figure.

However, if you still find that the space gained is not sufficient to your requirement, then it will be in your interest in the longer run, if you can add removable storage to increase the capacity. These include USB flash drives, DVDs, CDs, or using cloud storage.

• Google Drive – Google is providing free 15GB in the cloud. It is also called online storage. You can access your files in Drive from any smartphone, tablet, or computer. So, this is the easiest thing you can do to increase the working space.
• DVDs and CDs - If a CD/DVD Disc drive is available in your PC, then also it will serve your purpose.

• Pen Drives - Most PCs now have USB ports that can be plugged to a pen drives. It can be written and rewritten to an almost unlimited number of times, just like hard drives. Pen drives have almost replaced CD and DVDs.
• Cloud storage using OneDrive. Windows also comes with the OneDrive app. It lets you get free OneDrive storage in the cloud. Just like Dropbox, Google drive, you can save files to OneDrive and work with them.

Apart from that if you watch out over internet then you will many duplicate file finder utilities that can scan and clear all the duplicates of your system resulting in freeing up disk space.