How to get free space on your laptop

Its hard cluttered the drive of the mind is cluttered. (I think Albert Einstein said that.) If you’re always fighting against the “Low disk space” warning, maybe it’s time for some spring cleaning. Here ‘s how to find out what’s going on on your PC or Mac – and what to do with the files you can’t release.

Analyze your hard drive for storage Hogs

Before you start eliminating willy-nilly things, you should step back and look for the big winners. If you delete a handful of 50-MB files here and it won’t make as much of a difference as cleaning up an 80-GB folder of old TV shows or uninstalling a few games. (Unfortunately, if you’re a gamer, cleaning up old titles can free up large chunks of space right away – be honest about what you’re going to play. You can always reset more later.)

If you’re on a Windows 10 device, open Options> System> Storage to see a breakdown of your driver and which folders are taking up the most space. You can click on any category to see more information, especially in the “Other” section, which will show you individual folders with large files in them. Find stuff you no longer need, and get rid of it – it ‘s not always easy, but it’ s the best thing you can do to free up space.

If you’re on a Mac, you can scan your drive for large files by clicking Apple’s tab in the top left corner and going to About This Mac> Storage. Click the Manage button and you will see various categories in the sidebar that you can select for a list of large files. Right-click on files to delete them, and empty the trash when you’re done.

If you find these tools a little too basic, third-party options like WinDirStat and Disk Inventory X can dig even further to find out which folders and files are using your storage space. You may find an old iPhone backup that you no longer need, videos that you may have stored in the wrong folder, or disk images from that old Raspberry Pi project. For most people, the built-in disk analyzer will do well, but these third-party tools can be helpful if large files are hidden in more unconventional folders.

Clean up temporary and duplicate files

You may have heard this advice before: Both Windows and macOS store temporary files such as toes, old update folders, or saved internet files that you can delete to free up space. And that’s true, but I’m going to be pretty sorry here: These files will eventually recover, because that’s how the system is designed to work – these caches will help your computer run earlier. So while this may take up a little more space at the moment, it’s not a permanent solution, and it may not free up almost as much space as it does. clean out your own vaults of personal files.

In Windows 10, click the Start tab and search for Disk Cleanup. You’ll get a list of files you can delete, and at that point you can just click OK to free that space immediately – or click “Clean Up System Files” for a few more options.

A new feature called Storage Sense can do some of this automatically. Go back to Settings> System> Storage, and at the top, click the Configure Storage Sense link. This gives you some options such as deleting temporary files older than a certain age, or moving rare files to OneDrive (more on that in a minute). Flip the switch at the top to On when done, and select how often you want Storage Sense to run. Personally, I like to keep this off and manage things myself, but for each of them.

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