Trouble:
Do you feel that the free space on your hard-disk is too little ? Does it seem that something fishy is going on which is eating your hard-disk space? If your answer is yes, read on till end to uncover the secrets of this type of behavior.
Reasons for consumption of free space
Some of the key reasons are:
- Temp files on C drive
- Temporary Internet files
- Backup files created during installation
- Windows system restore data
- Duplicate copies of large files like movies, songs etc.
- Deleting Uninstall files for windows updates.
There are some more reasons as well, but these are most common reasons which can be observed. Now the important question, how to fix it ? Lets read on for the solution.
Fix:
1. Deleting Temp files:
Temp files are the files which are created for some temporary purpose by many softwares. Go to Start > Run type “%temp” (without quotes) and press enter. This will open a Temp folder, at this folder,select and delete all files at this location. After this empty your windows recycle bin.
Note: You may not be able to delete certain files as they might be in use, but delete as many as you can.
2. Deleting Temporary Internet files and backup files:
There are several ways to do it, but we will tell you the most convenient way. Open My computer, right click on the disk drive , go to properties and click on Disk Cleanup as shown below:
This will open a Disk cleanup window as seen below:
Select the temporary Internet files,recycle bin,setup log files, temporary files, office setup files, and any other option which is not very important for you and Click OK. This will start the cleanup process and will delete the un-necessary files thus increasing the disk space.
Note: Above two methods deals with removal of junk and temporary internet files which can also be removed automatically using a software called CCleaner which can be downloaded from here.
What is CCleaner?
CCleaner removes unused and temporary files from your system – allowing it to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more HDD space.
3. Deleting old restoration data:
As a part of system restore utility, windows creates some check-points and saves corresponding data on each disk having restore feature. These files also consume significant space. You can delete all of them except the most recent restore point data if you feel that your computer is running stable for a long time and you may not need very old restore points. To delete it, open disk cleanup window as mentioned in previous step and click on More Options tab as shown below:
Click on System restore clean up button as highlighted in red circle in image above. This will give a warning message, click yes to it. This will delete all old restoration points except the most recent one.
4 .Delete duplicate copies of large files:
Sometimes we have several copies of same documents, songs and even videos which consume lots of space un-necessarily. Finding them manually and deleting them is a real pain. But this work has been made very easy by double-killer. Its an intelligent utility which scans your drives for duplicate copies of files and gives you and option to delete them. You can download it from here for free.
5. Deleting Uninstall files for windows updates:
You can also delete some folders whose name starts with “$NtUninstall.” in the windows directory (for example C:\Windows ) if C drive is the primary partition.
However, They are referring to prior hot fixes, so they should be safe to delete if your system is stable with the fixes applied after windows update, and you have no intention of uninstalling them.
We hope that this article will help you see more free space out of your drives!
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Author + Admin: Abhishek BhatnagarHi, I am a Software Engineer by profession and blogger by passion, I write about computer tips and tricks and solutions for computer problems. You can connect with me at twitter or know more about me on www.abhishekbhatnagar.com.
sir,
My PC is infected by Virus like as autorun.inf, kinza.exe.
How to remove this virus.
Please suggest me
Regards,
Rajinder singh
Hello frds,
I am unable to detect my pendrive , i mean to say its show in the task bar that system has detected but the icon doesn’t show in the my computer, i tried yourtrick for changing drive letter but fortunately i dont have administrator rights can you tell me how i can do that without that admin permissions as initially it use to open without admin rights.
please reply at the earliest.
i am not able to open my restore point when cliking system restore nothing happens
Why would you even suggest using the windows Disk Cleanup utility? Windows doesn’t start popping up the low-disk space balloon until around 100mb of free space, and you can clearly see before running Disk Cleanup that you will only gain about 8.2mb of free-space. Now, that might be a lot on your 10 gig drive, but the rest of us who are near or over a terabyte, 8 and a half megs is nothing. Thats roughly 2 mp3s. Here’s a suggestion to people who need more space. Get a new hard drive (something over 10 gigs for starters), back stuff up to DVDs or delete unneeded files (like junk on your desktop or my documents). I mean, what can you honestly do with 8 megs?
@ da404lewzer
Hi
Well, i have experienced cases where disk cleanup cleans even upto a few gigs by removing compresses old files from NTFS volumes. So its worth giving a try, maybe you end up having a gig of extra free space 
I use Ubuntu and never get low disk space as long as I transfer larger files to DVD’s which I keep in dated, numbered trays so that I can use my hard drive database file to find contents of each DVD, hence my whole collection, quite easily. I can’t even find a disk cleanup program, how come?
Yeah, DVD’s are the way to go, or perhaps blu-ray 
too bad its a pain in the ass to have everything on optical mediums… I want my drive to have what i want when i want it! lol
Here’s another tip to get space back: regularly go through your torrent/p2p download directories and delete any zombies… i got back 6gigs from an *old* bearshare uninstall that didn’t clean up the tmp dir by simply cleaning it myself
[...] From time to time, especially when you install new softwares etc on your computer, Windows will create System Restore Points, so that your computer can be restored to a previous state in case some problem comes. You should delete very old restore points which you are very unlikely to use. See step number 3 mentioned in this post to delete the same. [...]
i have a gateway, and it blacked out, i put in a plain windows xp, i had to download load everything that went to my gateway for it to work, the problem is now it is saying low disk space and i can not get it to play my dvds.before hand i had already put in more memory,and now it is saying low disk space, i only downloaded the parts for my brand.
Thanks.. It worked.. I just gain back 2 Gigs by doing what you’ve said..
Thanks a LOT!
i just gained back 33gb i did all you said
You can also squeeze your photos a bit. My Canon produces huge photos. I’m not talking about their dimensions, I’m talking about poor JPEG compression that produces incredibly huge photos that look exactly the same as better compressed photos.
So I recompressed them with IrfanView. Details are practically the same as before, but photos are 300% smaller. So I repeated that in 5 different folders, before I gave up. Too much work. Later I found this utility called Photo Vacuum Packer that does the same job as Irfan except it automatically processes all subfolders.
This is only useful if you have tenths of gigabytes of photos like me.
Hi,
I have tried your suggestions.. It helped abit..but somehow the memory runs low very fast everyday.. could it be any autorun.inf or spyware which is reducing my disk space? How do i detect or how do i remove such “harmful” files ?
Greaty appreciate your help! Thank you!
Cheers
[...] files is one of the most important reason for low disk space on your computer, these duplicate files could be music files, images and other multimedia files, [...]
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