Hey there folks! Running out of that sweet storage space on your Windows device? All the drives in “This PC” are glaring red & that game you just bought from Steam, now that there’s the summer sale going on, can’t be installed because of “insufficient storage space”?
Fear not. Here’s 4 ways to recover space on your Windows machine:
Using Disk Cleanup as Admin:
- In the Start Menu, start typing “Disk cleanup”, (the result should be on top before you complete typing) & click on “Disk Cleanup – Desktop app” to get started.
- Right click on it, & select “Run as administrator” from the drop – down menu.
- Next select the drive that you want to free up your disk space on & hit “OK”.
- After analyzing your drive, this window will pop-up:
- As you can see from the snap above, there were 1.23 GB (strange number coincidence, I know) of junk update files residing on my hard drive. These are older updates that your PC does not need anymore. So it’s safe to remove them.
- Check all items on the list except Windows Upgrade log files and Device driver packages and hit OK.
- On the prompt to confirm your deletion, click on the “Delete Files” button.
- Then Disk Cleanup utility will delete the files that you selected & when it completes, the Disk Cleanup utility will automatically close.
Removing Older System Backups:
- Right – click on “This PC”, and select ” Properties” from the drop – down menu.
- On the “System” Window, click on “System Protection” from the left hand side menu.
- The “System Properties” window will open with the “System Protection” tab.
- Next, under the Protection Settings header, select the drive that has Protection turned on. Here it’s the “C:\” or System Drive.
- Click on “Configure” button.
- On my PC, there was 5.55 GB (again, a strange number coincidence. It’s almost creepy now…) of backups stored. Now, while older backups can come in handy if your system is not in a good shape, they are certainly not needed if your PC is running fine & you desperately need that storage space.
- Click on the “Delete” button to delete all system restore points stored on that drive. Confirm your action by clicking on the “Continue” button that appears on the popup window.
- Then all restore points will be deleted & when complete, you will get a confirmation.
You can also set the maximum storage space that you want System Restore to use by adjusting the “Max Usage” slider according to your convenience.
System Restore is a very useful & important system stability utility. It is recommended to keep at least 1 restore point, just in case you need to restore your system back to its stable configuration. You can create one using the “Create” button at the bottom of the “System Protection” tab in the “System Properties” window.
Uninstalling programs:
This is the most cliche when it comes to freeing up space on your Windows machine.
- Go to Start menu & open “Control Panel”. You can search for it.
- Under Programs, click on “Uninstall a Program”.
- Next, from the list of programs displayed uninstall applications by selecting them & clicking on the “Uninstall” option at the top of the apps.
Using Storage Sense:
Storage Sense is a storage utility provided in the UWP (Metro) Settings app that can automatically free up unnecessary storage space when it detects that the System is low on storage.
- Open settings, either from the “All settings” tile on the Action Center or searching for “Settings” in the start menu.
- Go to System > Storage.
- To turn on “Storage Sense” with the default settings & go to sleep, just turn on the slider under the “Storage Sense” header.
- If you want to customize, click on “Change how we free up space automatically”.
- Then tweak the settings according to your requirement. They are pretty much self – explanatory.
Hope you got some of that precious storage space back. Join the conversation below if you have any queries or have anything to add.
Peace.
Article published on: 25 - June - 2018 at 01:31 AM IST.
Sanctum Nine 