Calculate your free disk space in Microsoft Windows 7, Vista or XP?

In Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, the following steps will work for finding out how much space you have available on your computer's hard disk. Incidentally, enormous hard drives are so cheap these days that running out of disk space should be a less and less common problem, but you may run out of space if you have a lot of downloaded songs or movies (tsk, tsk). ~/Desktop (502) : cat !$ cat index.html

How do I find the amount of free disk space left on my Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 machine?

In Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, the following steps will work for finding out how much space you have available on your computer's hard disk. Incidentally, enormous hard drives are so cheap these days that running out of disk space should be a less and less common problem, but you may run out of space if you have a lot of downloaded songs or movies (tsk, tsk).

First you need to open the "My Computer" icon on your desktop. If you can't see your desktop, then right-click the taskbar at the bottom of the screen and pick "Show the Desktop":

This will minimize any open programs (i.e. will shrink their windows down to the bottom of the screen, without actually shutting the program down) so that you can see the desktop. Find the My Computer icon, and double-click on it:

In the My Computer window, you should see a section labeled "hard disk drives" which lists the disk drives inside your computer:

Actually, technically speaking this isn't a list of hard drives, it's a list of hard disk partitions. On my computer, for example, I have one physical drive inside the machine, but I have two partitions, C: and D:. The C: partition is the one that I actually interact with, where I install programs and save files. The D: partition was set up at the factory by Hewlett-Packard and contains a backup image of the disk's contents when it left the factory; that way, if the contents of the C: partition are ever deleted by mistake, I can use the D: drive to restore the PC to the state in which I first bought it. (That's why the D: partition is labeled "HP_RECOVERY".)

However, almost everyone refers to partitions like C: and D: as "drives", and for the purposes that you care about -- knowing how much hard disk space you have left and whether you're likely to run out -- you usually don't need to worry about the distinction between hard disk drives and hard disk partitions, so we'll refer to the C: "drive" and D: "drive" as well.

To find out how much disk space is left on the C: drive, right-click on C: and pick "Properties":

A window will open up listing the properties of the drive:

This picture shows that I've used 392 GB of space on the hard drive and have only 61.6 GB left -- so I'm running out, but very slowly, and that'll probably tide me over until I get my next computer. The "pie chart" also shows a nice pictorial representation of how much disk space I've already used (in blue) and how much is left (in pink).

Bennett Haselton is a technology and political blogger who runs a list of unblocked proxies, websites that are distributed to users by e-mail for getting around Internet censorship.