How To Clear Space On Laptop

Use Disk Cleanup/minitool Partition Wizard

You can utilize 2 tools to clean up computer. The first one is Windows built-in utility Disk Cleanup, while the other one is MiniTool Partition Wizard. Now, lets see how to use them to clean up PC.

Steps for Cleaning up Computer via Disk Cleanup

Step 1: Type disk cleanup in the search box, and then select Disk Cleanup from the search results.

Step 2: In the next window, click the button behind the Select the drive you want to clean up option to choose a drive to clean up, and then click on OK.

Step 3: After checking the files to delete checkboxes, click OK button to execute the operation. If you want to delete more system files , click on Clean up system files at the bottom left of the window and click OK.

Step 4: In the pop-up window, go to the More Options tab, and then click on the Clean up button behind the Programs and Features. After you click it, the Programs and Features page will appear and all the applications will be listed here, and then right click the application that you dont use and select Uninstall.

Steps for Cleaning up Computer via MiniTool Partition Wizard

To clean up computer, you can also use the third-party program MiniTool Partition Wizard. It is a professional partition manager, which can help you fix file system error, recover missing data, check SSD health, etc.

You will get this great tool by clicking the following button. After downloading and installing it to your PC, you can follow the steps below to clean up computer.

Tip:Tip:

Find Out What Files Are Taking Up Space On Windows 10

To see the files taking up space on the hard drive on Windows 10 version 1903 all the way to version 21H1, 21H2, and later, use these steps:

Once you complete the steps, you will understand what files take up most of the space on your device.

Disable Unnecessary Startup Programs

Is your PC running slow? It is probably that there are some unnecessary startup programs running in the background. To fix the issue, you can disable them in Windows Task Manager. Heres how to do.

Step 1: Right click the Windows icon at the bottom left of the desktop, and then select the Task Manager option from the pop-up menu.

Step 2: In the Task Manager page, go to Startup tab. Find the program that is unnecessary or rarely used, and then right click it and select Disable.

To know more information about disabling startup programs, please read this post: How to Disable Startup Programs Windows? Here Are Answers

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What Really Happens When You Delete A File

When you delete a file on your computer, the only thing thats removed is its reference in the master file table. The file still exists on your hard drive however, Windows doesnt know where the file is. This is because, as mentioned earlier, youre only removing the indexes and the links to the data and telling Windows it has permission to overwrite that area of the hard drive.

So, until the data is written over, it can be recovered by special tools or the right set of skills. The tools, or an experienced hacker, can scan the hard drive and look for the files and restore the links and indexes so Windows can see the files again. If youre selling a computer or even disposing of one, you should securely wipe the free space on your PCs hard drive so the files cannot be recovered.

Today well show you how to use the cipher command on the command line to securely write over the free space several times to make sure no data can be recovered. Well also mention some third-party tools that do the same thing.

Convert Local Files Available Online

To make files online-only with OneDrive, use these steps:

If you need to free up additional space, move other files to the OneDrive folder and repeat the above steps to make them available on-demand.

After you complete the steps, you will be able to access all of your content using File Explorer, but you will only be able to open them with an internet connection.

The free version of OneDrive only allows you to store up to 5GB of data, but you can upgrade to a Microsoft 365 subscription to lift the limit to 1TB . In addition to the 1TB of storage, the subscription also gives you access to all the Office apps and services like Microsoft Teams and Family Safety.

Once you complete the steps, repeat the same instructions to uninstall other apps and games.

If you use the Windows Subsystem for Linux , you may also have one or multiple distros still installed on the device. You can always uninstall them to free up space on Windows 11.

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Clean Up Files You No Longer Need

The first step is to get rid of the common space-hogging culprits. These include unnecessary applications and a variety of useless system files.

Go to the Start menu, type disk cleanup in the search box, and press Enter for the screen where you can whisk these items away. By the way, you can schedule Disk Cleanup to run regularly in Windows Task Scheduler. Heres how:

Click the Start button, type Task Scheduler in the search form, and press Enter. Under the Actions menu, select Create Basic Task. Follow the wizard to enter a description and set a daily/weekly/other schedule, then type cleanmgr.exe in the Filename box to schedule it. That method runs Disk Cleanup at a set time but still requires your input. If you want to run Disk Cleanup in the background without your supervision, you can create a scheduled task to do this using the command line:

• Go to the Start menu, enter cmd in the search box, and press Enter to open the Command Prompt.
• Type cleanmgr.exe /sageset:1 to open the Disk Cleanup settings.
• Select the types of files you always want to delete and press OK. This will create a Registry key to save these cleanup settings, and also run Disk Cleanup right now.
• Then go into Task Scheduler as mentioned above , and when you get to the Scheduled Task program screen, enter /sagerun:1 in the arguments to apply the cleanup settings.

Here are some other areas to consider for cleanup.

Eyeball Your Miscellaneous Folders:

Clean Up Pc Via Ccleaner

CCleaner is a free program provided by Piriform, which can help you clean up computer. However, there are some doubt about its security. Is CCleaner safe? This question has triggered hot discussion.

Therefore, you have to make sure that you have downloaded the Slim installer version that doesnt include any toolbars or other crapware before starting the following operations. If you want to seek more safe methods, please try other approaches in this post.

All the contents on the system will be listed after you click on the Analyze button. You are allowed to uncheck the content that you dont want to delete. If you dont have that demand, click on Run Cleaner directly.

Alternatively, you can also click on Uninstall or Drive Wiper button on the left action panel of the CCleaner to delete or remove useless applications and files.

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Reduce The Amount Of Space Used For System Restore

RELATED:Make System Restore Use Less Drive Space in Windows 7

If System Restore is eating up a lot of hard drive space for restore points, you can reduce the amount of hard disk space allocated to System Restore. The trade-off is youll have less restore points to restore your system from and less previous copies of files to restore. If these features are less important to you than the hard disk space they use, go ahead and free a few gigabytes by reducing the amount of space System Restore uses.

Upgrade System Disk To A Larger Disk Or Add A New One

If you find your C drive is out of space frequently or the methods above cannot thoroughly resolve your issue, you may try to upgrade your system disk to a larger one or add another hard disk to your computer.

# 1. Upgrade System Drive to A Larger Hard Drive

If the whole system hard disk is out of space, or the hard drive is too small, you can consider upgrading the current hard disk to a larger one.

“Disk Copy” feature of EaseUS Partition Master has the ability to help you upgrade to a larger disk. You don’t need to reinstall the operating system and applications.

Step 1. Select the source disk.

Right-click the disk that you want to copy or clone. Then, select “Clone”.

Step 2. Select the target disk.

Choose the wanted HDD/SSD as your destination and click “Next” to continue.

Step 3. View the disk layout and edit the target disk partition size.

Then click “Continue” when the program warns it will wipe out all data on the target disk.

You can select “Autofit the disk”, “Clone as the source” or “Edit disk layout” to customize your disk layout.

Step 4. Click “Proceed” to start the disk cloning process.

IMPORTANT: Mostly, the system C drive space is suggested to be 120GB or even bigger for excellent computer performance. So after replacing the old system disk, it’s recommended that you add or allocate more free space to the system C drive by following Method 1.

# 2. Add Another New Hard Disk

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Tips To Free Up Drive Space On Your Pc

Getting a message that your PC is running out of room can be a stressful eventor, even a genuine emergency if you’re in the middle of an important project. The good news is you can probably free up a lot of space on your PC running Windows by following the tips here. But if you keep getting messages about low drive space, you might want to consider other options, including adding additional removable storage.

To get the most out of these tips, do them in order from top to bottom.

Free Up C Drive Disk Space

Mostly, useless large junk files, big files, huge installed programs, and temporary files are taking up the most space in your system C drive after using your PC for a long time. So the other effective method you can try is to free up hard disk space.

Here are 3 ways that you can apply to free up space in the C drive and even the hard disk space:

#1. Run Disk Cleanup

Disk Cleanup is a Windows built-in tool that you can apply to delete some files so as to free up disk space via Windows File Explorer. Follow the steps below to free up disk space on your C drive:

Step 1. Press Windows + R to bring up Windows File Explorer.

Step 2. Click “This PC”, right-click on C: drive and select “Properties”.

Step 3. In Disk Cleanup, select the files you want to delete and click “OK”.

If Windows installation files show up, check and delete them. This will help to free up a huge space in C: drive.

# 2. Delete Temporary Files on C Drive

As you know that temporary files generated by Windows OS may also take up huge space on the system C: drive. You can also try to delete the temporary files so as to resolve the C drive full issue. Some steps to delete the Temp files on different Windows OS may differ:

Delete Temporary Files in Windows 11/10/8:

Step 1: Press “Windows + I” to open Windows Settings, click on “System” and ” Storage”.

Step 2: Under “Storage”, select “This PC ” to analyze.

Step 3: Click on “Temporary files”.

Step 5: Go back to Storage usage and now click “Other”.

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How To Securely Wipe The Free Space On Your Windows Pc

Are you selling, giving away, or disposing of a Windows PC? Learn how to securely wipe its hard drive so your data cannot be recovered.

When you delete files from your hard drive, did you know that the file never actually gets deleted and is likely able to be recovered using tools like Recuva? Normally this isnt an issue as we use our computer each day however, if youre planning to sell or donate your computer and dont want your old data to be recoverable, follow the steps below to wipe the free space on your hard drive. The process is the same and will work on Windows 7, 8, and Windows 10.

Store Files In The Cloud

If you take advantage of cloud storage via OneDrive or another service, you’re probably double-storing files and photos. Well, you don’t have to do this — all cloud storage services allow you to select which folders are downloaded and saved to your PC .

If you use OneDrive, here’s what to do: Right-click on the OneDrive icon in your system tray and choose Settings. In the Settings tab, check the box for Save space and download files as you use them. This setting will let you see the files you have stored in OneDrive from File Explorer on your PC, which pulls off the neat trick of showing you all of your local and cloud-based files in one spot. In File Explorer, you’ll see three different icons for OneDrive files in the Status column:

• Blue cloud: online-only file
• Green checkmark in white circle: locally stored file that might revert back to online when you run short on space
• White checkmark in green circle: locally stored file that will stay put, no matter how short on space you get

You can easily move OneDrive folders and files to your PC and back again. To move a file or folder stored in OneDrive to your PC, right-click it and select Always keep on this device. To remove the local copy of the file or folder and have it stored only on OneDrive, right-click it and choose Free up space.

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Upgrade To A Larger Hdd/ssd

If none of the above options will free up enough free space on your hard drive on Windows 10 or Windows 7, the most thorough solution is to replace the old hard drive with a larger new hard drive. Cloning is the best way to replace a hard disk drive, because cloning can migrate your old disk to the new one exactly, without any data loss, and it’s very convenient.

EaseUS Partition Master, an ultimate partition management tool, enables you to clone an entire disk to another even the destination partition is smaller than the source, which means you can clone larger HDD to smaller HDD.

Step 1. Select the source disk.

Right-click the disk that you want to copy or clone. Then, select “Clone”.

Step 2. Select the target disk.

Choose the wanted HDD/SSD as your destination and click “Next” to continue.

Step 3. View the disk layout and edit the target disk partition size.

Then click “Continue” when the program warns it will wipe out all data on the target disk.

You can select “Autofit the disk”, “Clone as the source” or “Edit disk layout” to customize your disk layout.

Step 4. Click “Proceed” to start the disk cloning process.

Except for disk cloning, EaseUS Partition Master provides more one-stop disk partition features, such as resize/move partitions to solve low disk space issue, merge partitions, create/delete/format partition, wipe partition data, and disk/partition conversion.

Free Up Space Deleting Temporary Files

As part of the storage tools available on Windows 11, you can also delete temporary files manually using the Storage settings.

To delete temporary files manually, use these steps:

Quick note:

Once you complete the steps, the files will delete permanently, freeing up space on the computer.

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Target Large And Duplicate Files

If youve done the above, youve made a big improvement in your hard drive space usage, but now lets dig deeper.

To find out whats really taking the most amount of space on your hard drive, use a disk space analyzer. WinDirStat scans your drive to show you graphically how much space each file takes up. Select the large blocks in WinDirStat to hone in on the files that are taking up the most spaceand are therefore candidates for deletion.

Auslogics Duplicate File Finder finds those pesky files youve stored in more than one folder. You can also search solely for duplicate files that take up a large amount of space, quickly identifying the worst offenders.

Delete System Restore And Shadow Copies Using Disk Cleanup

Disk Cleanup utility helps delete older system restore files to reclaim additional storage. To delete the system restore points, except the recent one:

Storage Sense in Windows 10 helps delete temporary files from the system drive and secondary or external drives. To free up disk space using Storage Sense:

To delete temporary files with Storage Sense:

Note:

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