With the age of the SSD upon us, storage capacity, especially for your main install, is at a premium. I am constantly being asked by people how to free up disk space on Windows 10. So I thought it was about time to write up a little helpful guide (which will also work for those still on Windows 7 and 8).
I have a 256GB SSD as my main hard drive. However, the “full” capacity has been steadily creeping up over the last year or so. So it was time to do something about it. And you can to.
Doing what is set out below, I managed to free up over 80GB worth of space on my hard drive.
Here’s how.
How To Free Up Disk Space In Windows
The very first thing we need to do is run the inbuilt disk clean up utility. So click on the start button and then type disk cleanup. Click on the app and when it asks you which drive you want to clean up, leave it at the default C drive and click OK.
Disk cleanup will then scan the drive and show you which files it can remove and how much space you can gain. But before clicking OK, hit the button that says “clean up system files” and then click OK for the default C drive.
Disk cleanup will scan C drive again and bring you back a new “revised” total for how much space it can clean up. Scroll through the list and see if there are any Windows Update or temporary installation files that have not been check marked, as these can give you significant space back.
Then click OK and let it do its thing. Congratulations! Just those few minutes should have seen you reclaim loads of storage space.
However, if that was not enough, lets move on and show you how to free up even more disk space on Windows 10.
Disable Hibernation. If you disable hibernation on your pc, you can free up a fair few GB’s of space.
To do so, click the start button and then type command. Command prompt should come up. Right click it and select run as administrator. Then copy this command into command prompt and hit enter.
Powercfg -h off
The amount of space saved corresponds to how much RAM you have installed. At 16 GB on my machine, it turned out to be quite the saving. However, a word of warning. Turning hibernate off will also disable quick start. So if you really need that feature, don’t do this!
My last tip for you to free up disk space on Windows 10 is this handy piece of freeware software.
WinDirStat. Download, install and run this little piece of software and you can pinpoint exactly what is using all of your storage. It turned out for me that the Adobe Suite was using a ton of space for caching purposes. Without WinDirStat I might never have spotted that and been able to correct it. Seriously, it will show you everything on your system and which folders are taking up the most space. Then you just navigate to the folder, see which non essential stuff you can remove and your done.
And there you go. If you followed my guide on how to free up disk space in Windows you should now be the proud owner of a computer with plenty of storage space.
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