7 Effective Ways to Clean Up a Disk in Windows

Any oper­at­ing sys­tem is grad­u­al­ly over­grown with junk files. Usu­al­ly, the OS is able to delete them on its own so as not to clog the hard dri­ve. How­ev­er, not only she lit­ters, numer­ous appli­ca­tions also do this. What to do if you want to clean the disk in Win­dows from unnec­es­sary files? Let’s look at all the pop­u­lar meth­ods.

Deleting temporary files

The Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem includes many sys­tem pro­grams. Almost all of them save all sorts of tem­po­rary files. The OS also has a Recy­cle Bin, which many users for­get to emp­ty reg­u­lar­ly. Win­dows can also cre­ate recov­ery images. Do I need to say that the old­est of them can be safe­ly delet­ed?

Files con­sid­ered tem­po­rary by the sys­tem can be delet­ed from your disk at any time. And they do not need to be searched with a mag­ni­fy­ing glass through some Total Com­man­der. Instead, fol­low these sim­ple steps:

1. Go to “Explor­er”.

2. Right-click on the C dri­ve (usu­al­ly it is the sys­tem dri­ve that stores the oper­at­ing sys­tem files).

3. In the con­text menu, click on the “Prop­er­ties” but­ton.

4. In the win­dow that opens, click the “Disk Cleanup” but­ton.

5. In the next win­dow, you need to mark the ele­ments that take up the most space. After that, click the “OK” but­ton. If the sys­tem asks for it, con­firm the dele­tion.

In fact, at the first stage, Win­dows does not offer to get rid of all junk files. If you want to delete obso­lete restore points and all sorts of tem­po­rary files, then click Disk Cleanup again, but now click on the Clean up sys­tem files but­ton. Now you can mark the largest objects and delete them. After that, go to the “Advanced” tab. There is a sec­tion “Sys­tem Restore and Shad­ow Copy” — in it you need to click the “Clear” but­ton, after which it remains only to con­firm the update.

The steps above are most use­ful after you’ve updat­ed your oper­at­ing sys­tem. The fact is that after that, a back­up copy of the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the OS, which you no longer need, may remain on dri­ve C.

Auto Disk Cleanup

If you are a hap­py Win­dows 10 user, you can enable Auto Disk Cleanup. This fea­ture is called Mem­o­ry Sense. It will auto­mat­i­cal­ly delete files that you do not use. It should be acti­vat­ed if this is not the first time you are faced with a lack of free space.

To launch “Stor­age Sense”, you need to go along the path “Start” — “Set­tings” — “Sys­tem” — “Stor­age”. Here you need to acti­vate the switch “Mem­o­ry con­trol”.

The default tech­nol­o­gy may not work for you. There­fore, we rec­om­mend that you addi­tion­al­ly click the “Change how you free up space” but­ton. In this case, you can change cer­tain set­tings.

Removing unnecessary programs and games

Have you been using a com­put­er for more than a year? It is pos­si­ble that you have installed a huge num­ber of pro­grams and games. Do you delete them after apps and toys are no longer need­ed? It is unlike­ly that you still use all the soft­ware that you installed. But pro­grams can also take up a large amount of free space. Not to men­tion the games, the size of which is begin­ning to amount to hun­dreds of giga­bytes.

To view the list of installed pro­grams and games, do the fol­low­ing:

1. Open the Con­trol Pan­el.

2. Go to the “Pro­grams and Fea­tures” sec­tion. It may have a dif­fer­ent name, depend­ing on the ver­sion of Win­dows.

3. Here is the list you need. Now you can sort it by soft­ware size in descend­ing order. So you find out which games and pro­grams take up the most space.

In the future, we rec­om­mend installing one or anoth­er unin­staller. Such a util­i­ty mon­i­tors what changes occur in the file sys­tem when a par­tic­u­lar pro­gram is installed. In the future, this allows the unin­staller to remove such pro­grams, clean­ing up absolute­ly all the tails.

Deleting temporary files

As we have already said, the oper­at­ing sys­tem accu­mu­lates a huge amount of tem­po­rary files. How­ev­er, she is not the only one doing this. Third par­ty pro­grams also pro­duce them. Some­times even in large num­bers. Luck­i­ly, you can always take care of them. Their absence often does not affect the per­for­mance of the soft­ware.

How exact­ly to clear Win­dows of tem­po­rary files — we have already described in a sep­a­rate arti­cle. The eas­i­est way is to install the free CClean­er. In it, to start the process, you need to press just a cou­ple of but­tons.

Removing the largest junk files

You can reg­u­lar­ly down­load large files and then for­get to delete them. For exam­ple, many peo­ple leave movies down­loaded to their com­put­er via tor­rent. Often the user is reluc­tant to find out the size of each file. And if he did, there would imme­di­ate­ly be a desire to get rid of some of them.

To find heavy files on the disk, you can man­u­al­ly go through all the fold­ers using Explor­er or some Total Com­man­der. How­ev­er, you get bored quick­ly. There­fore, it is bet­ter to use one or anoth­er util­i­ty that solves this prob­lem in auto­mat­ic mode. Many of them are dis­trib­uted free of charge. If you are inter­est­ed, we will def­i­nite­ly write a sep­a­rate arti­cle on this top­ic. In the mean­time, let’s briefly talk about three pro­grams of this kind:

To clean the disk, you can use the already men­tioned CClean­er. The cor­re­spond­ing func­tion­al­i­ty should be looked for in the “Ser­vice” sec­tion, it is called “Disk Analy­sis”. Here you will see a chart that shows how videos, music, pho­tos, and oth­er types of files use up free space.

A lit­tle more func­tion­al is the pro­gram
WinDir­Stat. It will even more clear­ly show what exact­ly your hard dri­ve is clogged with. In this case, you will be pro­vid­ed with a map of its sta­tus, where dif­fer­ent types of files dif­fer from each oth­er in their col­or. Click­ing on the map allows you to quick­ly jump to the select­ed file, after which you can delete it.

Pro­vides a hard dri­ve sta­tus map and
SpaceS­nif­fer. But here the view­ing depth is eas­i­ly adjust­ed. You can also change the num­ber of dis­played parts. In a word, here you start by view­ing the largest files, and then move on to small­er ones. Most impor­tant­ly, the appli­ca­tion is portable — it does not need to be installed.

The pro­grams described above allow you to eas­i­ly get rid of those files that take up too much space on dri­ve C. In some cas­es, this helps to achieve a more sta­ble oper­a­tion of the oper­at­ing sys­tem. How­ev­er, no one for­bids using these util­i­ties to clean up oth­er disks, where numer­ous files that have already become unnec­es­sary can also accu­mu­late. And be warned that the scan will take some time, espe­cial­ly if you are using an HDD rather than a sol­id state dri­ve.

Removing duplicate files

Often we down­load files to our com­put­er with­out real­ly think­ing about it. As a result, dupli­cate files can eas­i­ly end up on a PC. This hap­pens when we love pho­tog­ra­phy very much. Also, copies of songs already on it may end up on the hard dri­ve. Dupli­cates should be removed. But first they need to be dis­cov­ered.

Spe­cial util­i­ties are engaged in search and removal of dupli­cate files. In par­tic­u­lar, this func­tion has been men­tioned more than once CClean­er, dis­trib­uted for free. But this pro­gram may skip some files, espe­cial­ly if they have com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent names and tags. That is why it makes sense to down­load
dupe­Gu­ru — this util­i­ty is able to focus sole­ly on the con­tents of files. To do this, before scan­ning, in the “Search Type” field, select the “Con­tents” item. The pro­gram can be down­loaded on Win­dows (this ver­sion is not updat­ed, but is ful­ly func­tion­al), and on Mac OS X, and on Lin­ux. Devel­op­ers do not ask for mon­ey.

And these are just the two most pop­u­lar util­i­ties. If you so desire, we will talk in detail about pro­grams for find­ing dupli­cate files in a sep­a­rate arti­cle.

File Compression

Old ver­sions of Win­dows did not sup­port any spe­cial tools for free­ing up space on the C dri­ve. Well, Win­dows 10, as we already under­stood, can auto-clean up the disk. Also, “ten” allows you to com­press data. The built-in Com­pact OS util­i­ty is respon­si­ble for this. It was devel­oped for the sake of ade­quate oper­a­tion of the oper­at­ing sys­tem on lap­tops with a very small hard dri­ve or SSD.

This util­i­ty com­press­es option­al Win­dows 10 items and some oth­er files. It usu­al­ly frees up about 6 GB on the C dri­ve. At the same time, the oper­at­ing sys­tem is able to acti­vate the util­i­ty on its own if it feels there is not enough free space. You can check if the OS is now com­pressed by open­ing a Win­dows ter­mi­nal with admin­is­tra­tor rights. Here you need to enter the fol­low­ing com­mand: “com­pact / compactos:query” (with­out quotes).

If in response you see “The sys­tem is not in a state of com­paction, but if nec­es­sary it can go into it”, you should enter the fol­low­ing com­mand: “compact.exe / Com­pactOS: always”.

This will launch the afore­men­tioned util­i­ty. It will imme­di­ate­ly start com­press­ing the data. Depend­ing on the type of dri­ve, the process may take a dif­fer­ent amount of time. At the end, you will be pro­vid­ed with a cor­re­spond­ing report.

You will free up space on dri­ve C in this way, but the oper­at­ing sys­tem will start to work a lit­tle slow­er. This is due to the fact that its files will be decom­pressed on the fly, and this takes some time. Only own­ers of SSD and a large amount of RAM will not notice the slow­down. But even such peo­ple will have prob­lems if the Bit­Lock­er fea­ture that encrypts the sys­tem dri­ve is also enabled.

Conclusion

As you under­stand, disk cleanup in Win­dows can be done in sev­er­al ways. And often they are not in any way dif­fi­cult to mas­ter. It is enough to try out at least one of them, after which in the future you will use it almost ful­ly auto­mat­i­cal­ly.