Overview

Over time, hard drive space gets used up, pure and simple. Here are some steps you can take to free up disk space and keep your hard drive lean and efficient.

Use TreeSize Free or WinDirStat to find the largest files on your hard drive

TreeSize Free and WinDirStat are two free utilities that scan your hard drive and present you a list of all its contents, including file sizes. By default this list is ordered from largest to smallest, with the largest directories showing at the top. These tools are a great way to determine the largest files taking up space. From there, you can manually remove any files that you do not need.

Manually remove files in the “temp” Directory

  1. Open a Windows Explorer window
  2. Type in %temp% in the directory location bar
  3. Control – A to Select All items
  4. Right-Click on the selected items and select Delete
    1. This will move those items to the Recycle Bin. Some items may not move if they are in use. If you receive any errors pertaining to this, you can just skip those files.
  5. Empty the Recycle Bin to regain hard drive space

Manually remove files in the “Downloaded Installations” folder

  1. Open a Windows Explorer window and navigate to “C:\Windows\Downloaded Installations”
  2. Control – A to Select All items
  3. Shift – Delete to permanently delete the files