How to free up disc space?

Grey's_Anatomyfan643 · 8 November 2019 at 8:04PM

Evening,

Just wondering if anyone can give me some advice, how do I free up some disc space on my windows desktop PC? It's a new PC so I like it run smoothly - at the minute it saying: 184 GB free of 232 GB should I be worried about that or is they plenty of space yet?

It's a Windows 10 pro if that helps.

A.Penny.Saved · 8 November 2019 at 8:30PM

You have lots of space so I would not worry about it. Start worrying when it gets to 30GB. Your drive is fairly small which could be a SSD drive.

How is your drive organized? Is it just a primary partition? Ideally you would not store anything on that partition. Having a Logical partition as a data partition works well and can be backed up and deleted without interfering with the windows partition. It also makes backing up or imaging the windows partition easier.

You could always get another drive to use as a data drive. 2TB hard drives drives cost around £60. If your not downloading a lot then it is probably not necessary.

There is some free software which shows you were the space is used. Tree Size free, Folder Size & Wiztree.

debitcardmayhem · 8 November 2019 at 8:50PM

As A.P.S says , but you could use Win10 storage sense too if you wish

omendata · 9 November 2019 at 11:28PM

Get a copy of ccleaner or dustbuster - both free they do a great job.
Check you installed programs - some of them might be huge and sort them by size and delete the biggest ones or ones not used anymore!

Windows also has a free space cleaner just hit the windows button and type Disk clean up.

If you are feeling adventurous you can also delete all the folders inside C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution

As an IT professional the best way to install windows these days is to have the boot drive on a small ssd and one or more conventional drives to store your data and programs. That way if you lose the os you can reinstall easily and not lose your data or programs and have to reinstall everything.

My main Desktop PC has 7+ disks each dedicated for OS-1, Programs, Data, Backups, Archive Backups, OS-2, OS-3 plus network nas drive and multiple external backup hdus - believe me once you lose all your lifes data pictures and precious memories you will never do it again so best to be safe than sorry

Me personally i have this configuration on one of my new laptop systems:
With a laptop you can generally take out the cd/dvd if you have one and replace it with another hard drive if that is your setup like mine it is setup thus:-

Disk 0 - SSD 64GB - Windows 10 Boot & System
Disk 2 - 1TB HDU - Programs + Data + C: Backup

Disk3 - External Drive - Secondary c:\ Backup +

Drive

esuhl · 10 November 2019 at 1:25AM

A.Penny.Saved wrote: »

How is your drive organized? Is it just a primary partition? Ideally you would not store anything on that partition. Having a Logical partition as a data partition works well and can be backed up and deleted without interfering with the windows partition. It also makes backing up or imaging the windows partition easier.

You can have up to four primary partitions per drive, so unless you need more than that, it's (marginally) better to avoid extended and logical partitions.

How to free up disc space?

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