5 tips to free up hard drive space

Network Administration - Although there are more and more large hard drives available, no matter how big the drive is, one day you'll find it missing. For that reason, tips to free up hard drive space are never out of date. In this article we will introduce five tips to help you do that, but before you do any of the techniques, you should perform a full backup of the system.

1. Delete application cache

If you want to free up disk space, the first thing you should do is delete the application cache. Application cache may contain a lot of data. For example, some older versions of Internet Explorer can consume up to 10% of the total hard disk space by temporary files. Recent versions often use the default cache size of 50 MB.

A clearer example is the video editing application. These types of applications can cache all source video files and the capacity for this cache can be several tens or several hundred GB.

2. Search for disk error signs and system upgrades

Hard drive errors and operating system upgrades can consume a lot of disk space. Open the command prompt window and execute the CHKDSK command with the / F switch. This will cause Windows to scan the entire hard drive for errors and fix the problems it finds (note that you need to perform a backup before proceeding). In some situations, this method can free up a lot of disk space.

Even if no errors are found, it does not mean that no errors have occurred before. When CHKDSK catches a file that cannot be edited, it will save the junk file in the .CHK file. Unless you want to recover lost data, you can delete temporary files (.TMP files) and log files (.LOG), both of which can be deleted without affecting it. to the operation of the system.

Another thing to check is the old Windows installation. If Windows is reinstalled (or you install a new Windows version) from outside the Windows operating system, Setup installation will save the previous operating system by creating a folder named Windows.old . If you don't need to touch the Windows installation first, you can safely delete the Windows.old folder safely.

3. Run Disk Cleanup

The desktop versions of Windows all have a very interesting tool, the Disk Cleanup Wizard . This program will search the system of unnecessary files and allow deleting these files (such as memory dump files). You can run the Disk Cleanup Wizard by opening My Computer, right-clicking on the drive you want to clean up, selecting the Properties command from the menu that appears. When you see the disk's properties sheet, click the Disk Cleanup button on the General tab.

4. Search for unnecessary applications

Most new computers include a lot of trial applications and software may not be important to you. One recommended method is to delete the entire hard drive on the new computer and start installing the operating system again, some computers are slow due to using the factory configuration.

In this situation, you can go to Control Panel and remove any trial applications that are not currently used as well as software that is not needed for you. Also in this section, check to see if any applications have been installed before that you don't need to use.

If the system has a Windows.old folder, it is likely that the remaining application will be in the Program Files folder. These applications will not appear in Control Panel because they are installed on the old operating system. Now there is only one way to 'get rid of' the applications that you have to manually delete them from the Program Files folder.

5. Remove the manufacturer partition

In addition to trial applications as well as pre-installed software on your computer, the computer also has a recovery partition. This partition exists to be able to reset factory defaults in case of a computer malfunction. In some cases, we can delete the recovery partition and then merge the free space with other partitions on the system. The way you can do this is to backup the system, delete all partitions, create a large partition and then restore the backup.

Obviously, if you remove the recovery partition, you cannot use it to rebuild the system. However, if Windows is installed, this problem is not important to you. Partition recovery is nonetheless not updated promptly. For example, if the system uses Windows Vista but has been upgraded to Windows, the recovery partition will now include an obsolete operating system (Vista).

Do not forget to put the drive

All of these techniques have the potential to recover quite a bit of lost hard drive space. However, whenever there is a need for a large amount of disk space, a better way is to defragment the drive.