Technical progress is not at a standstill. In particular, hard drives for computers are getting larger and larger. But for some reason, it often happens that after some time, the disk becomes overfilled. The system starts to lag. And so, the time comes to clean out the computer or Android and look for free space. Does this situation sound familiar?
And for those who use a solid-state hard drive in their laptop, this problem becomes relevant much faster. SSDs are very fast and convenient, but they offer significantly less storage space than traditional mechanical HDDs.
Let's look at a few ways to find and free up space on your hard drive.
1. Manual Search
It's a good idea to start by searching and deleting unnecessary junk in those folders that you yourself created or copied onto your hard drive. Go through all your downloads. Remove unwanted movies, music, pictures, installation packages of programs - they "eat up" the free space as much as possible. After removal, do not forget to empty the Recycle Bin. If that's not enough, move on.
2. Analyzing disk space
To find out exactly which files or folders on the disk take up a lot of space, you will need to use special utilities. These programs scan your hard disk and clearly show you which files and folders are the largest and where they are located.
SpaceSniffer is a program for finding large files on your computer disk.
But the program shows the size of all files on the disk - system, personal, temporary, any files. So before you delete something, you should know exactly what you’re doing. If you do not know what this file is and what it is for, do not delete it!
3. Disk Cleanup Utility
Windows has a built-in utility for cleaning your hard drive of unnecessary stuff. It helps you remove various temporary and not very necessary files that have accumulated on your system.
To call it, launch Explorer, right-click on the C drive, and select Properties. Then click on the Disk Cleanup button, the program will scan the disk and offer to select and delete unnecessary files.
There is another option for a quick start of the HDD cleaner - click Start and in the Find field type the word "clean" and press Enter. The disk cleanup will start right away, you will only need to select the disk to clean: C, D, or another (if available). Since we need to clean the system drive - choose C.
4. Cleaning Temporary Files
The built-in disk cleaner is useful and good, but it doesn't remove temporary files that are created by third-party programs, not Windows. For example, browser caches. When you use Google Chrome or Firefox to surf through various sites, they save pictures, browsing history, and other temporary files to your hard drive to speed up the loading of pages when you visit them again. Over time, this content accumulates and takes up a lot of space.
To remove all the garbage, you can download and run CCleaner. It is the most famous, popular, and free program for cleaning the system from unnecessary junk on the disk. It detects more than 50 types of junk files. After scanning your system for unwanted files, you can view detailed information about each one and decide what to delete.
5. Uninstalling unwanted programs
The next step to get free space is to remove unnecessary programs. You may have accumulated a set of programs, games, utilities that you don't use but that take up disk space while using your computer. This is especially true for modern games. They are very consuming and take up a lot of free space.
Go to the Control Panel - Programs and Features and you will see a list of programs installed on your computer. If you click on the "Size" column, programs will be sorted by the amount of space they take up. This will make it easier for you to find and uninstall the heavyweights.
It is also worth considering an alternative for your desktop programs and finding conversion software or a video editor online. Perhaps online versions are suitable for your tasks just as great, and you will free up a significant amount of disk space.
6. Reduce the amount of disk space used for system recovery
Another one of the hard disk space eaters is system restore points. You can reduce the amount of quota allocated on the HDD for system recovery. This will reduce the number of those points, but it will free up space.
7. Extreme measures
If, after all the steps, you still lack memory space, you can go to the extreme step. It is not recommended. Do that only in a hopeless case, at your own risk.
First, you can disable hibernation (sleep mode) completely. When the system goes into hibernation mode, all memory contents are written to the hard disk in a file called Hiberfil.sys. This mode allows you to return your computer to where you send it to hibernate without having to reboot and without wasting power. Instructions on how to disable hibernation mode are here. Once hibernation is disabled, the voluminous Hiberfil.sys file will be deleted.
The second is to disable system recovery completely. This is done in the same place where we reduced the recovery disk limit. Just select Disable system protection. But remember that in case of a crash or an incorrectly installed driver, you will no longer have an easy way to get the system back up and running.