About 70% of the people owning a laptop or a PC with Windows are not aware of the fact that there disk space is getting bloated everyday on regular internet usage. I’ve myself fixed hundreds of machines on the issues of low disk space.
Not just internet, when you install and uninstall some application from your machine the previous data gets stored in Windows System Restore usage data.
If you are using your PC taking care about the external executables and internet viruses then there’s no reason that you shouldn’t free up your disk space by the following given methods for your Windows XP and Vista.
Disk Cleanup
Open your Run Dialog Box (Windows + R button) and type cleanmgr.exe
On prompting, select the drive where your Windows is installed. It’s usually C:
Disk Cleanup window will open up asking you to select the locations from where you want to free up your space. Select all of them and Press OK button below.
Please note that it may take some time to open up Disk cleanup Dialog Box as Windows take time to extract compressed files sometimes. Also cleaning up process may make you waiting sometimes.
Cleaning up System Restore
Microsoft introduced System Restore feature to make you go back in time if you mess up with your system in future. But if you are the one like me and have never downloaded any third party executables from the internet or from external USB sources then you can clean the System Restore data regularly to free up huge chunk of space from your system.
Follow the simple steps below to free up System Restore space -
- Press Windows + Pause/Break button to open System Properties and select System Restore option tab. In Vista it’ll have a little different interface.
- By default System Restore is turned on in Windows. Check the “Turn off System Restore on all drives” option and press the Apply button below. This will turn off the System Restore for all of the drives.
- Now to be on the safer side again enable the checkbox and Apply the settings. By now you already have cleared up the disk space used by it. Click on the drives other than C: and then on settings and turn off System Restore on those drives as you don’t need it.
This will free up lot of disk space which you were wasting earlier.
Please note that there are some exceptions that you may have even after freeing up the space by the above methods. I’ve seen several cases where after doing every possible thing there was at least 2-3GB of disk wastage. For all such issues you can either comment here or contact me.
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