Tidy Your Drives with Storage Sense

YOU’LL NEED THIS

WINDOWS 10 The OS comes with Storage Sense—you just have to

make sure it’s enabled.

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS you can do to keep your PC running well is to ensure its storage drive isn’t full of files and programs you no longer need. Over time, you’ll find your drive can get clogged up with files as you install programs and download updates. The fuller a drive is, the slower it can perform, but thanks to Windows 10’s Storage Sense, it’s easier than ever to keep your PC clutter-free. Microsoft has designed Storage Sense to be “a silent assistant that works on your behalf without the need to configure it.” This means that you can let Storage Sense work in the background, without worrying about it. However, as with any tool that removes files from your PC periodically, you should explore the settings to make sure Storage Sense is removing the correct files, and leaving anything important untouched. In this guide, we’ll show you how. 1 ENSURE STORAGE SENSE IS ON First, make sure that Storage Sense is enabled. To do that, open the “Start” menu and go to “Settings.” Once there, click “System,” then select “Storage.” This gives you an overview of all the drives that you have installed in your PC, along with how much storage space is available. Underneath that you’ll see a section called “Storage sense” [ Image A]. Make sure this is set to “On.” 2 CHANGE SETTINGS To change how Storage Sense works, click “Change how we free up space automatically.” A new window now appears, giving you various options. The first enables you to set when Storage Sense runs. By default, the tool runs whenever your drive space is low, but you can change this. Click the drop-down menu underneath where it says “Runs Storage sense” [ Image B], and pick a schedule if you want it to run more regularly, such as every week. 3 TEMPORARY FILES When using your computer, various apps (and even Windows 10 itself) create and store

numerous temporary files, which are only required for a short amount of time. After that, they just take up valuable space on your drives, so it’s worth allowing Storage Sense to remove those files after a set period. The default delay is 30 days, which we think is a reasonable amount of time to ensure those files are no longer needed [ ImageC]— but again, you can change this setting if you prefer. 4 DOWNLOADED FILES Usually, when you download a program or file, it’s kept in your PC’s “Downloads” folder. However, even after installing a program, the installer itself is usually left in that folder, and over time, you may find that you end up with a lot of large files in there, swallowing up your storage. To remove your downloads at certain intervals, click the menu under where it says “Delete files in my Downloads folder” [ Image D], and choose an appropriate time. 5 FREE UP SPACE NOW If you want to use Storage Sense right now, you simply need to hit the “Clean now” button, which immediately starts the process of cleaning your PC’s storage drive [ Image E]. It uses the settings that you’ve selected from the rest of the page, so if you’ve chosen to never delete files in the “Downloads” folder, this process respects that choice. After clicking the button, you’ll see a message appear on screen, asking you to wait while Storage Sense runs. 6 OTHER WAYS TO CLEAN UP YOUR PC With Storage Sense enabled, you can leave Windows 10 to keep your drives free from clutter. However, there’s also a number of other tools in Windows that can help you keep them clean. First, open File Explorer, and click “This PC” in the left-hand pane. This gives you an overview of all your PC’s storage drives [ Image F], and from there you can see how much space is on each drive. 7 USE DISK CLEAN-UP Disk Clean-up is a tool that preceded Storage Sense, and has been a part of previous versions of Windows for a while now. While Storage Sense does a lot of what Disk Clean-up used to do, the older tool is still useful. In the “Start” menu, search for “Disk Clean-up” and press Enter. In the window that opens, select the disk you want to clean [ Image G]. This is your “C:” drive by default. 8 CHOOSE WHAT TO CLEAN Disk Clean-up scans your PC for various files that are safe to remove, and then lists them in the window above. You’ll see how much space each type of file takes up. Click the checkbox to place a check mark in it, which marks those files to be removed, then click “OK” to delete those files. For more options, click “Clean up system files” [ Image H]. You need to be logged in as an administrator to do this.