5 Ways to Free Hard Disk Space & Clean Up PC

If you are going to opt for the inbuilt options to regain hard disk space then you can gain generally upto 1Gb of HDD space which is less when compared to the other options which can help you in cleaning up the disks to larger extent and saving up your space.

• Uninstalling/ Deleting Unwanted Programs :
  There are numerous programs which you would have installed on your computer but never reused them. These can be removed and reinstalled whenever really needed. Access Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs. You have a option to ‘Sort by Size’ where you need to click and find the biggest installed software applications on your computer.

  

  In this screenshot you can find that i have got couple games and applications which when Uninstalled can help me in saving up around 2-3Gb of Hard Disk Space.

• Removing Windows Components : When you install windows operating system on your computer by default there are many windows programs installed which are not really required and can be uninstalled. You can find the list of installed Windows Components under Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Add or Remove Windows Components which will open the Windows Components Wizard. You can remove programs like MSN Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Messenger etc which are not regularly used.
  
• Remove Unwanted Temporary Files : In your computer there are thousands of files which were created while installing/running/uninstalling software’s and these are left in your HDD which can be removed easily. Here are few file extensions which are to be removed by using the inbuilt search feature in your operating system -
  *.bak
  *.tmp
  *.~*
  ~*.*
  *.old
  *.bkp
  *.$$$
  *.diz
  Readme.txt
  MSCreate.dir
  *.gid
• Clean Temp Folder : Access your Windows > Temp folder which has all kind of temporary files like .tmp, .log etc which can also consume a good amount of hard disk space. A Lot of Junk files are stored in this folder because most applications use the Temp folder to save the temporary files and you need to clean this up.
• Compressing Disk Drives : You need to convert FAT to NTFS in order to compress your disk drives. Go to My Computer and right click on the Disk Drive you want to Compress. Check on the option ‘Compress drive to save disk space’ though this option is available in NTFS formatted drives only. After this compression all the files stored in the drive will be automatically compressed and you will be saving a lot of space on all the already saved files and all the files which will be added in the drive in future.