Your hard drive space gets filled, you want to free up some space now because of experiencing the lag, freezing program, or difficulty in finding your files then this article is purely for you. In this article, you are going to see “Best ways to free up space202 of Hard drive in Windows 10“.

No matter how larger your hard drive is in your PC or laptop. There is a time comes when you get out of space in your hard drive. Here you’re going to see many possible ways to make space on your hard drive disk-like compressing your files and more. Just follow the below steps to free-up space.

I believe before searching on “How to free up hard drive space in Windows 10” you try to delete some files but they didn’t work enough to free up space due to Recycle bin.

Best ways to Free-up Hard Drive space in Windows 10

#1 Empty the Recycle Bin

When you delete any file on your PC or laptop they just don’t get deleted immediately. Those deleted files go into recycle bin and continue taking space of the hard drive because you can still able to restore deleted files. So make sure you recycle bin is empty. To clear your Recycle bin:

Step 1: Go to Desktop

Step 2: Do right-click on Recycle Bin and click “Empty Recycle Bin“

Step 3: Click “Yes” to permanently delete your Recycle bin items.

#2 Disk Cleanup

Windows 10 comes with a built-in disk cleanup feature, which can help you to make space by removing various files which include temporary, internet files, system error, cache data, and windows various hanging updates.

Step 1: Click on the Start button.

Step 2: Search for “Windows Administrative Tools“, select “Disk Cleanup“.

Step 3: Select Drive, type of files and hit OK.

If you’re not sure which items in the list should be deleted for that, click the “view files” button to check before proceeding. If you want to delete system files such as previous windows 10installations you can delete Windows old folders by selecting “Clean up system files“.

#3 Delete temporary and downloaded files

In this method, you can delete temporary and already downloaded files without running the Disk Cleanup option.

Step 1: Go to settings>system then click on “Storage” present on the left side panel.

Step 2: In the new window, click on “Temporary files” and it starts calculating all files.

Step 3: Select your Download, Windows update, and many more and atlast click on the “Remove files” button to delete them.

#4 Turn on Windows Storage Sense

It is set to automatically delete unused temporary files, clean recycle bin, and download folders files that are a day or over 60 days old. You can also choose to move old files of your PC to cloud storage via OneDrive if you didn’t open files for a long time.

Transferring your system local files into cloud storage is one of the best options to choose:

Step 1: Click on the “Start” button.

Step 2: Go to “Settings>System“.

Step 3: Now to “Storage” present on the left panel.

Step 4: Toggle ‘ON‘ the Storage Sense.

#5 Save file to different file

You know computers have multiple hard drives by default 2 and you can make more as well by diving them further. If you, however, get out of space in one hard drive then you can move that files to other drives or change the default location of saving those files. To make default this option:

Step 1: Open “Settings“, go to “Storage” as we go in the above methods.

Step 2: Now scroll a little, and click on “Change where new content is saved“.

Step 3: Now select which files go to which place. You can even select a USB drive or memory card that is physically connected to your PC.

#6 Disable Hibernate

Instead of purely shutting down your system you can hibernate your system which allows you to start your system faster. Whenever a computer goes into hibernate situation, it stores the last snapshot of your files and drives before shutting them down, it takes some space on your drive to store it. So by disabling hibernate you can reclaim some space.

Step 1: Click on a Start button.

Step 2: search for the command prompt and open it by selecting Run as administrator.

Step 3: Now type the below command:

powercfg hibernate off

and hit enter.

Note: To re-enable hibernate, type command:

powercfg /hibernate

#7 Uninstall Software/apps

You definitely have some software and apps on your Pc or laptop that you no longer use now, you just forget them. You also have bloatware that comes pre-installed on your PC by manufacturing companies. To find out which software or apps taking much space. Follow the below steps:

Step 1: Open “Settings>Apps“.

Step 2: Now ‘Apps & feature‘ get opened, do sorting by size.

Step3: Now do right-click on apps and click on ‘Uninstall‘.

Another method on Window to uninstall software:

Step 1: Go to ‘Control Panel>Program‘.

Step 2: Now select ‘Uninstall a program‘.

Step 3: Now do right-click on-screen and sort it as size.

Step 4: To uninstall, right-click on any program and click on Uninstall button at the top of the list.

#8 Clean your Desktop screen

Many people (also me) store their files on the desktop by default, which is taking space of C drive indirectly. Storing a lot of files on a desktop makes your system slow.

You can move or delete these desktop files, make sure you move these files to another drive, which automatically free up C drives because all files on the desktop are taking space of C hard drive.

#9 Clear Update Cache

Another way is to make space in your system by removing updated cache data. The Update cache consists of copies of the update files. Just remove them to make spaces.

First, stop the Windows Update services by following below steps:

Step 1: Click on the Windows ‘Start‘ button.

Step 2: search for ‘Services‘ and open it as an ‘administrator‘ by doing right-click on it.

Step 3: Now in the pop-up window, scroll a little bit down and find ‘Windows Update’ right-click on it and choose stop.

Now to deleted files:

Step 1: Open Run box and type “C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download” and hit enter.Now you deleted everything in the Download folder.

Lastly, move back to services and ‘re-enable Windows update‘.

#8 Delete Delivery Optimization Files

Window 10 comes with a new feature called “Delivery Optimization” that allows your computer to pull updates from other machines nearby. The main motive is to deliver update faster but it comes with the drawback of using higher bandwidth usage and increased memory usage.

Let’s see how to delete these files, before deleting we need to disable the feature otherwise it comes again.

Step 1: Go to “Start>Settings>Update & SEcurity>Windows Update > Advanced Options>Delivery Optimization”.

Step 2: Now make sure the slider is set to the “OFF” position.

Step 3: Now, search for Disk Clean-up and open this app.

Step 4: After scanning, search for an entry called “Delivery Optimization Files“. Click in the checkbox, then hit “OK“.

#9 Delete the OEM Recovery Partition

The most computer comes with an OEM recovery partition. Windows 10 have large redundant files and can be safely removed.

Note: I suggest that you try this method atlast. First, follow all other methods instead of this, then atlast you want much more space or desperate more space. Take a complete backup of your data and create a USB recovery drive before continuing.

Using command prompt:

Step 1: Open the command prompt with “run as administrator” rights.

Step 2: In command, type Diskpart and press enter.

Step 3: Then type List disk and press enter.

Step 4: Now type, Select disk X ( X is the number of disks where recovery partition is saved). Then type List Volume.

Step 5: Now you can see a list of all volumes on disk, including the recovery partition. Type Select Volume X(replace X with the number of unlabelled volumes)

Step 6: Last, type Delete volume and hit Enter.

#10 Remove Duplicate files

We sometimes copy files from one place to another and forget to delete them from the previous location. It’s hard to remove duplicate files from the system by selecting one by one and the window does not come with any feature of analyzing and removing these types of files instantly.

At that moment the third party comes to help you, Duplicate Sweeper comes with a clear and easy interface to use that easily find and remove duplicate files, documents, music, photo, images, etc.

It comes with a free and buys trial.

#11 Compress files

Step 1: Choose any large file you want to compress.

Step 2: Do right-click on it and select ‘properties‘.

Step 3: Now tap on ‘Advanced…‘.

Step 4: In the pop-up window, check on ‘compress contents to save disk space‘.

Step 5: Click on ‘OK‘ and ‘Apply‘.

This is the default window feature. You can use third-party software also which compresses your large files to smaller size files than windows compression.

#13 Use Best Cloud Storage services

Sometimes you have important files which you don’t want to use now but want to store as a memorable event. At that time you can use secured cloud storage which allows you to use them for free with top security of your files.

Also read: Best secured Cloud Storage of 2023

Conclusion

These are the easy best ways to free up space on your windows 10 Pc or laptop that you are ever suggesting or going to see in another platform as well. What other methods do you use to free-up space in your Pc or laptop or any issue you get while free-up hard disk space then, let us know in the comment box.

FAQs on Free-up Hard Disk Space

I hope this article helped you!

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