0Free up disk space on Windows

Most PCs that I encounter have drives that are full. This was the case in the days of HDD, and with mod­ern SSD typ­ic­ally being smal­ler it is even worse. A full drive will slow your PC down, as well as the annoy­ance of run­ning out of space at a key moment. Here are a good range of ways of free­ing up space

1. Empty the recycle bin

2. Unin­stall unwanted / unneeded programs

3. Run cleanmgr.exe to clean up junk files

4. Run cleanmgr.exe includ­ing sys­tem files to remove unne­ces­sary win­dows update files and oth­er sys­tem junk

5. Delete all of the files in %temp%

6. Use Glary Util­it­ies to remove lots of oth­er junk files, includ­ing from com­mon applications

7. Use Patch Clean­er to remove orphaned win­dows installer files

8. Delete old installer folders from the C: drive includ­ing “nvidia” “amd” “intel” “msocache” and others

9. Clear out old sys­tem restore files (or turn sys­tem restore off)

10. Run a disk check to make sure the amount of free space you have is cor­rectly recognised

11. Use WinDirStat to identi­fy any unex­pec­tedly large folders to clean up