I keep running low on space on my PC hard drive and am wondering if there’s any sort of trick for freeing up all my wasted space, especially with temp files and such? I’m running Windows 7 if that makes a difference?
It’s amazing how those pesky drives fill up! I remember the first external hard drive I had was a 20MB drive for an original Mac 512K and when I got the drive I gazed at it and thought about how it was unimaginably large and that surely it’d take months for me to fill it up! Nowadays I get email that’s more than 20MB in size and have an iPod with four times that storage space.
There are also some programs that seem to consume vast amounts of disk space as they create temp files that aren’t always removed, ever expanding as you proceed with your projects. Then there’s video, which consumes an incredible amount of disk space, even if it’s just temp files from watching your favorite YouTube videos again and again.
Fortunately, Windows includes a slick little utility that can identify and help remove all of these temp files, log files from software installs and more. Even better, to get there, you have to also learn how to figure out how much disk space you have available.
Start out by launch “Computer”…
That’s it. You don’t have to go any further to see how big your disk is and how much space you have left:
But don’t stop there. Right click on the disk space display and check out the options:
Choose “Properties” and you’ll move into the Local Disk Properties window:
To move to the area where you can identify and clean up the unwanted files, click on the button in the middle of the window, “Disk Cleanup”.
The utility takes a little time analyzing the files on your disk, maybe 2-3 minutes, then it displays the various categories of safely removed files, with sizes listed:
For me, none of these areas are particularly huge, but still, why keep them around, even if the space freed is just 10-20MB? I mean, heck, that was the size of my original hard disk, and now we’re not even bothering with it??
Go through the individual categories, reading the description of each, then decide which you can safely remove and check them. Ready? Click on “OK”…
Ya sure? Okay, click on “Delete Files” and …
That’s all there is to it. If you are still finding your disk space vanishing, analyze which programs you’re using the most and see if they have temp folders. If so, check to see whether that’s the culprit.