How to free up disk space in Windows

(Pocket-lint) – If you find yourself running low on disk space on your Windows computer, there are several ways you can clean things up to free up disk space.

Of course, you can always buy an extra drive to add more storage, but if that’s not an option, there are other things you can do.

Start with Disk Cleanup

There is a tool built into Windows called Disk Cleanup. With this tool you can remove downloaded files, temporary error messages, temporary internet files and more.

To use Disk Cleanup, follow these steps:

1. Open the start menu by clicking the start button or the Windows key on your keyboard
2. Type disk cleanup to search for the tool
3. Select the drive you want to clean up and click OK
4. Select the files you want to delete and click OK
5. Repeat the process and select “Clean up system files” at the bottom
6. Select other files to delete and click OK

System files cleaning can remove leftover Windows update files, Microsoft Defender files, upgrade logs and more.

Empty your trash

If you’ve deleted files from your computer to free up disk space, you may have overlooked your Recycle Bin.

When you delete files in Windows, they aren’t completely deleted, they are moved to your Recycle Bin. This is ideal when you need to recover accidentally deleted files, but files in your recycle bin are still taking up space on your computer. You may find that the Recycle Bin is full of large files that are still cluttering up your computer even when you thought you got rid of them.

To empty your Recycle Bin, right-click on it and click Empty Recycle Bin.

If you want to be a little more careful, right-click the trash and click Open. Then you can see all the files that you have previously deleted and check if you are satisfied before completely deleting them forever.

Change your recycle bin settings

After you’ve emptied the recycle bin, it may also be worth changing the recycle bin settings. By default, Windows reserves a certain amount of space for files in the Recycle Bin. When you reach maximum disk space, Windows will start deleting older files in the Recycle Bin.

It is possible to adjust the amount of space that the Recycle Bin can hold, thus preventing it from clogging up your drive in the future.

In order to do this:

1. Locate the Recycle Bin on your desktop
2. Right-click it and click Properties
3. Choose a maximum size for the recycle bin (lower means less will be stored before it is completely deleted)
4. Or click “Do not move files to Trash. Remove files immediately after deletion.”
5. click OK

Obviously, this step can mean that you have no possibility to recover files if you delete them. So be careful with these settings.

Remove unused apps

If you’ve been using your Windows machine for a while, you probably have many programs installed, some of which you probably no longer need. You may find some apps that you don’t use regularly, that you haven’t used in a long time, or that are just taking up so much space that they need to be removed.

One step to free up space on your Windows computer is to uninstall apps and programs. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Open the start menu by clicking the start button or the Windows key on your keyboard
2. Type add or remove programs
3. Click to open the app
4. From there you will see a list of installed apps. You can filter them by size or install date to see which ones to delete
5. Click the three dots for anything you don’t need
6. Click Uninstall and follow any additional instructions that appear
7. Repeat the process for anything else you don’t need

Move files to an external drive

An alternative to deleting files is to move them to another drive. It might be a bit obvious, but you can use one external SSD to back up files and remove them from your Windows machine.

This requires an additional purchase, but it’s still worth backing up files, and saving may be better than deleting.

With most drives of this type, all you have to do is connect the drive to your PC with a USB cable, and then simply move the files you want to keep from your Windows computer to the external drive.

1. Connect the drive to your PC
2. Open File Explorer
3. Find the files you want to move
4. Click CTRL+X to cut the files
5. Open the external drive in Windows Explorer
6. Press CTRL+V to paste to the external drive

Alternatively, if the two locations are open in different instances of the file manager, you can simply drag the files from one drive to the other.

Writing by Adrian Willings.