How to Free Unallocated Hard Disk Space?
Regardless of the size of the hard drive of the computer or laptop system, space fills up quickly and often we fail to check this. The downloaded files or saved files somehow manage to expand and fill the hard drive space which makes the system slow.
No matter how large sized hard drive your system use, space fills up so quickly even without your knowledge. Your downloaded and saved files somehow manage to expand and fill the hard drive space and make the system slow, especially true for internet lovers. A computer with a low hard disk space run slowly and gives you a painful experience. Well, there could be various many reasons that make a computer slow; this post helps you free up space for important files and programs by removing the junk cluttering up your hard disk.
Here are the techniques you can use in the hard drive running out of space:
Remove Temporary Files
To remove temporary files and folders you can use Windows’ Disk Clean up utility. Although it doesn’t allow deleting temporary files used by other programs, still you can use it initially. This manual process doesn’t allow you to remove caches used by Firefox or Chrome browser, which might have used GBs of hard disk space. In order to an efficient cleanup, you can use a professional utility that lets you remove junk files also removes Windows files that Disk Clean up will not even touch.
Delete Duplicate Items
Duplicate files are of no use and take a lot of drive space. Removing these unnecessary files might free a good amount of space on your hard drive. You can use a duplicate-file-finder application to search duplicates in your hard drive and remove them.
Clean up Disk
Windows has an inbuilt tool that removes all the unwanted temporary files and applications. In order to run that tool, right-click on your targeted hard drive from the system and go to Properties.
And then select Disk Clean up button available in the disk properties window.
Now choose the file types you want to remove from your system and click OK. This option includes all the temporary files, log files; recycle bin data, and other unwanted files. You are also allowed to clean up the files not listed here by selecting Clean up system files button in case you want to remove some other system files.
When you are done with the above selection process, click ‘More Options’ button and choose the ‘Clean up’ button available under ‘System Restore and Shadow Copies’ option to remove system restore data. This button removes the most recent restore point, therefore if you want to keep all the restore point you should choose this option as after that you won’t be able to use the older system restore points.
Uninstall Useless Applications
There are multiple programs that get installed on your system knowingly or unknowingly, but all of them do not capture much space. Therefore, in order to free the hard drive space by uninstalling applications, you need to know about their total size. To do that go to control panel and select ‘Programs and Features’ and select the Size column to check the space captured by each program installed on your system. In case you are unable to see this column, go to options button available at the top right corner of the list and click ‘Details view’ option.
Note: This information is not always correct as some applications don’t list the complete information about the space they have captured in the Size section.
Analyse Disk Space
If you want to find out the exact space captured by the applications stored on your hard drive, you need to analyse the hard disk. There are various third-party applications available that scan your compete hard drive and list all the files and folders along with the space captured. These professional programs are dedicatedly designed to find out the most space taken by the folders and files on the hard drive. Make sure you do not delete any important system files as it may corrupt your OS.
Cut down the Space used for System Restore
In order to free up space in your hard drive, you can also remove the System Restore points as they might have eaten up a lot of hard drive space. Usually, a System Restore captures a lot of hard disk space, removing those means lots of free space. However, after that, you will have less number of restore points to restore your system from the previous version of files. If you can manage it or these files are not very important then you can surely go ahead and free a few GBs by removing the space occupied by System Restore.
Other Options to Customize
If all the above techniques don’t provide you with much space then there are some other options also available that will surely save some space. Usually these options are disabled in Windows by default and also not recommend by most of the users, but still can be useful for once.
Disable Hibernation: When you run your system in hibernate mode, it saves the contents of its RAM to your hard drive. This option lets you save the system state without any power usage, after running the system in hibernate mode, whenever you boot your system the next time, you will be back where you left. When you disable mode it removes all the files and saves the hard drive space.
Disable System Restore: If you disable the System Restore option entirely, it will reduce the amount of space occupied by System Restore. However, after this, you will not be able to restore your system to an earlier state, if you need.