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10 best ways to free up space on disk

What to do if your disk is filled up and you want to make some free space somehow? Well, this article explains different steps you can do to get more free space.

Low free disk space

1. Run disk clean manager. This tool identifies certain categories of files which are least required. You can run your Windows without having these files on disk.  I advise you to go through each of the listed categories and manually select or unselect each one. When I run this tool on my system, it does not check ‘debug dump files‘ and ‘system memory dump files‘. You may select these files for deletion unless you want them for debugging crashes.

Free up space on disk

2.  Remove unwanted software: Run appwiz.cpl and uninstall the programs that you do not need any longer. You might have installed some application for just one time use, you may uninstall all such software.

3.  Remove duplicate files: You might have created multiple copies of same files(documents, photos) on the disk. Use a duplicated finder to identify and delete all such files.

4.  Defrag the disk:  Run dfrgui from Run and click ‘Defragment disk‘. You may even schedule monthly automatic defragmentation from this tool. You can run defragmentation from command prompt also.

5.  Remove restore points: Run system restore(rstrui) and delete restore points that are not necessary to have. Each restore point you have on your system may take 3 to 5 percent of the used space on the disk. It may consume at least 300 MB space. If you have multiple restore points, you may delete them except the latest one. In case if you have only one restore point, it is not advisable to delete it.

6.  Delete software installers:  You would have downloaded lot of software installers/packages. Since the software is already installed on your computer, most probably you will not need them again. Even if needed, you can download them again. I usually keep all the downloaded software in a separate folder, If I need to free up space on the disk, I go to this folder and delete those big files.

7.  Find big files: Using Windows search feature, you can identify the files that are consuming most of the disk space. In Windows 7, this can be done as follows. Open ‘Computer’ and click the drive you want to free space on. Now in the right side search bix, type ‘size:gigantic‘ and press enter. This will list out all the files that are using > 128MB space. Check if any of those files are not required and if so delete them. Don’t bulk delete them, you might have important files in the list.

If the above tips have helped you in getting more free space on your computer, please share your comments below.

More advanced tips:

8.  Remove hiberfil.sys:  You can disable hibernation on the system and get rid of C:hiberfil.sys file. This would immediately free up 1 to 3GB space.

9.  Enable compression:  This might not have effect for audio, video files and pictures. But it would significantly reduce the disk usage for text files.

10.  Remove offline files : If you are an enterprise user and are using offline files for the network shares you access, then you can consider deleting this offline files cache. Do this only if you have not modified the files locally.

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