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).
~/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).
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dear sir
i have win7 32bit os,recently i full format my laptop and reallocate my all drives, but there is one error occured. when 279 gb remaining and i create the drive but it say’s no free space avaible. i tried so many time but i can’t allocate .and it since remain.
please sir say any sollution….
@Naomi,
Realize this is a belated reply, but hopefully it will elucidate the concept to someone viewing this post: There is a difference between memory/RAM and disk space.
RAM is random access memory. It is the digital space used by programs/apps when they run. Typically, in this day and age, 2 GB is a minimal amount of RAM one needs; more is better — 8 GB anymore is a good amount, but that number will no doubt rise with time and sloppy programming. The more memory a computer has, the more efficiently (fast) it runs. It can’t hurt to have more RAM and the amount of necessary RAM only grows with time, i.e. as software becomes more complicated and bloated.
Disk space is where data/information is stored. Anymore computers come with 40+ GB (Gigabytes) of hard disk space; some have a terabyte (TB) or more (1 TB = 1000 GB).
Computers also use virtual memory in conjunction with RAM, and this comes from disk space. I’ve heard that at lest 10 GB or 10% of total disk space should be left open for this purpose. The 10% figure sounds unnecessarily large for disk drives over 100 GB: does someone with a 1 TB drive really need to leave 100 GB empty? Seems like overkill.
To the person with the 1 GB Recovery drive that is thinking of repartitioning in order to make this space usable: this seems like it would be a small portion of your entire disk space, and it doesn’t hurt to have a recovery partition, in case your main disk has problems and you need to boot or run things from this spare recovery portion, so I wouldn’t muck with it. In addition, repartitioning can be tricky and result in data loss (always backup before trying something like this in any case). If you really need an extra GB or more of space, you might as well get a new hard drive — either a bigger internal one or an additional external drive. If 1 GB really makes all the difference in the world to you, then just get a flash memory stick that can hold multiple gigabytes. You should have an additional external hard drive anyway, for backup purposes.
As an example, I have an internal 500 GB disk, which I have found I have filled up with little trouble — although I am keeping 13+ GB of it free. I have now bought a 2 TB external hard drive which I am going to partition — one 500 GB partition for backup of my internal drive and then another 1.5 TB of additional archiving space. I will likely also make another small (10 GB) partition for a bootable recovery drive, so that if my internal drive bombs, I can run my rig — and possibly fix things — from the external drive.
I have a HP desktop and was using your advice on working how much room I had left on my hard drive. I noticed that I have a HP_Recovery drive similar to your screen shots. I found that it’s 1GB in size and was wanting to know how I can erase that drive and use the space and merge it with my ‘C’ drive?
Thanks for your help in advance. 🙂
I’m having a few minor oddities happening. So I go into all the big name stores and pick the brains of the guys and gals working in the aisles.(I also do a lot googling and searching the internet) Someone suggested my pc’s memory might be low. After looking at the disk properties it lookes like I have plenty of memory, I have 149 GB total and I have only used 24.9 GB. I googled a question about RAM and clicked my way to your website. I am so glad. (Oh, I use Windows XP home ver.) Thank you for your help.
Naomi
I have a HP laptop. I remember vaguely when I used the HP recovery partition that it completely wiped out all my data. Can you tell me if this is correct as I don’t want to try it again to see. I would prefer to find another way.
Wilf.