Having a computer or laptop with a sufficient amount of space is quite fortunate so that you can store huge data on it without having to worry about running out of space. Unfortunately, if you don’t have enough space even to receive an important message would be truly irritating and stressful. Whether you have got a massive hard drive it would be fine even if the drive quickly gets filled up with your favorite movies, games, apps and other useful software. But, a tiny SDD can’t hold much of your data. If your spacious hard drive is completely packed with worthless things and you have t clean it up. But how?
It’s not enough to delete things left and right. You need to find the huge space hogs, know which ones are worth deleting, and make sure you aren’t creating harm to your computer os laptop in the process. If you often notice yourself on the verge of running out of the disk space while trying to install any app or download any movie. Then you need to certainly find out how you can save and clean out some space on your Windows PC. Luckily, there are a some methods you can use to maximize the space on your Windows computer by cleaning it. Check out the simple ways through which you can save a huge amount of space, or maximize the space on your Windows PC.
Simple Ways to Save Huge Amount Of Space on Your Windows PC
There are lots of simple ways that exist to improve hard-drive space and hold the dreaded “out-of-disk-space” warnings away. Here are the handy ways that you must add these to your repertoire which would be beneficial whenever you need. Let’s check some of them out.
1. Analyze Disk Space
Storing a huge amount of data on your device while transferring or downloading, it becomes quite challenging to find out where actually the data is located. For that, you need to analyze your disk space and check out the location of items on your device and then find out which item is taking the most space. It is one of the best ways to get rid of items of maximizing size in the shortest amount of time.
It also helps in finding files that you might have downloaded some days back but overlook where you have stored the file. Disk analyzer will let you know where the files are stored and give you the way to delete which you don’t want for further use.
2. Target & Remove Duplicate Files
To find out which file is actually holding the most amount of space on your hard drive, you need to use a disk space analyzer. Sometimes, knowingly or unknowingly, people move the files to another location resulting in having two copies of the same file. This situation is quite common for most of the people. So, if you are really concerned about how to find out the duplicate files then there are a lot of tools designed to remove duplicate files.
By deleting the duplicate files on your device, it gives you free space and also aids you to save a huge amount of space that was consumed by the same file. You can also search individually for duplicate files that use a huge amount of space, instantly identifying the critical offenders.
3. Clean Up Files You No Longer Need
The first step you need to follow is to get rid of the general space-hogging offenders. These include redundant applications and a kind of worthless system files. Some of the files that hogs gigabytes of your potential free space are your device’s Recycle Bin, Temp folders and some other random system files. There are some built-in features on Microsoft’s Windows devices such as disk cleaner, Windows Disk Cleanup that will help you free up this space for you.
- Go to the Start menu on your device.
- Type disk cleanup in the search box, and just hit Enter on the screen where you can flutter these items away.
- You can even schedule Disk Cleanup to run automatically in Windows’ Task Scheduler. Check out the steps below:
- Hit the Start button and look for the Task Scheduler in the search box.
- Under the Actions menu, pick Create Basic Task. Just follow the wizard to enter a description and set a schedule as per your choice like daily, weekly or some other schedule.
- Type cleanmgr.exe in the Filename field to schedule it. This method runs Disk Cleanup at the time which was set by you however, it still needs your input.
4. Uninstall Unnecessary Programs
At one point or the other, most of the people have installed programs thinking that they would use, or just wanted to try, but ultimately don’t need. Do remember to uninstall the programs that are not required by you or you have not used them since long back. To get rid of such useless applications, such as old games or some worthless software, you need to uninstall such programs from your device. This will help you to save a lot of space. But make sure you have ways to reinstall the app so that you can install it again whenever you need it. Here is a manual process to uninstall programs from your device permanently. Check out the below steps:
- Go to the Control Panel >> Programs and Features.
- Select the program or programs you want to uninstall, and click the Uninstall button at the top.
Sometimes, your manual cleanup efforts don’t remove all the stray items that can be draining disk space. Try to make use of a Dedicated System Cleanup Tool which is a utility designed just for completely cleaning your system can do the task a lot better.
For a complete cleaning action, make use of CCleaner which is a free utility program that erases browser histories and caches, temporary files, system restore points, and other items responsible for your disk drive’s bloat. One folder you should surely pot out frequently is the Downloads folder. If you ever want to reinstall a program, possibilities are you’ll need to use the latest version available from the developer’s website rather than the one you downloaded long back into that catch-all folder, so try to delete those useless installation files.
4. Store on the Web
One of the latest and advanced technologies is cloud storage that has truly revolutionized the mode of thinking and storing data on systems. Cloud storage provides you the ability to upload your files or server so that you can save space on your PC or laptop and you can access those files from anywhere. There are well-known cloud storage services such as Dropbox, SugarSync, Amazon cloud service etc. that offer tons of free space online you can use instead of your hard drive.
Cloud storage services offer Microsoft’s SkyDrive, for instance, gives you 7GB or 25GB free (depending on when you signed up for the service), while Box, Google Drive, and SugarSync Free offer 5GB. Dropbox Basic starts at 2GB for free.
5. Clear Temporary Files
It is quite essential to delete or clear temporary files on your device that occupies much of your storage space. Deletion of temporary files becomes important as it uses hard disk space and can truly be using hundreds of gigabytes of hard disk space. You can use third-party tools or programs to clean up temporary and Firefox or Google Chrome browser caches like CCleaner.
6. Run Software in your Browser
A Web-based software can frequently rival desktop software in terms of functionality and these programs are often free. Instead of installing the Microsoft’s office suite on your device you can simply use Google Docs or run Microsoft Office Web apps within SkyDrive online.
Pixlr Editor can replace for the space-hungry Photoshop for photo editing, PDFescape does the role of Adobe Acrobat, Screenr is an online screen recorder that can substitute Camtasia, and, instead of Quicken for your personal finances, you could use Mint or Adaptu. So don’t feel restricted if you have a small hard drive. Use some of these simple strategies so that you may find your hard drive to be larger than you consider.
7. Wipe Unused Space Feature
There are some features of Windows like Hibernation, System Restore that use hard disk space to operate. A number of hard disks are reserved for these features yet these features are not used by most of the people. You can decrease the amount of hard disk space being reserved or eaten by system restore. If these features are less significant to you then you can move forward to save a large amount of hard disk space.
These are the seven simple ways that help you save a huge amount of space on your Windows PC. Hope this tutorial guides you in the best way to save large storage space on your Windows PC or Laptop.
