FREE UP SPACE ON YOUR HARD DRIVE
Remove junk files from your hard drive
The Storage Sense feature in Windows 10 and 11 automatically removes junk files that are taking up space on your hard drive, but you can also run it manually.
Open Settings and click System followed by Storage. Here you’ll see a breakdown of what’s taking up space on your PC. Switch on Storage Sense if it isn’t already active then click ‘Configure Storage Sense or run it now’ in Windows 10 (see screenshot), or just Storage Sense in Windows 11. Specify how frequently you want to purge your PC of temporary files and old files in your recycle bin and Downloads folder. For an instant clean-up, click ‘Clean now’ in Windows 10 or Run Storage Sense Now in Windows 11.
Click back to the Storage screen and select ‘Temporary files’. This section goes further than Storage Sense by letting you delete space-hogging junk such as old Windows Updates and driver packages, memory dump files and thumbnails for photos, videos and documents. Select the items to delete and click ‘Remove files’.
Back on the Storage Screen, explore the other categories such as ‘Apps & features’ (called ‘Installed apps’ in Windows 11), Documents and Other to identify and remove further space hogs. Windows 11 helpfully provides ‘Cleanup recommendations’ based on large apps and files you don’t use, which can save you a bit of time. Once you’ve deleted all unwanted junk, you should have several gigabytes of extra storage – we increased our free drive space from 9.2GB to 36.7GB (see screenshots) through manual removal, gaining 27.5GB.
Compress large drives and partitions
Windows lets you compress drives (including SSDs) and partitions on your PC to shrink their size and free up space
– often many gigabytes worth. Unlike ZIP files, compressed drives don’t require you to extract their contents to access files, because the NTFS compression – and decompression – process is handled in the background. This means you can browse compressed drives in File Explorer in the usual manner, though files may take longer to open.
To compress a drive or partition, right-click it in the This PC section of File Explorer and choose Properties. On the General tab, select ‘Compress this drive to save disk space’ (see screenshot below left) then click Apply. Choose ‘Apply changes to drive, subfolders and files’ and click OK. Click ‘Continue’ if prompted to provide administrator permission and the drive or partition will be compressed. This can take a while, depending on its size and contents.
If you find the compressed drive or partition too slow – especially if it’s your main system drive – untick the ‘Compress this drive…’ option then click Apply.
Switch off Hibernate to free up space
The Hibernate feature in Windows conserves power when your PC is idle by copying everything in its memory to a file called ‘Hiberfil.sys’, then powering down your system. When you turn your PC back on, Windows quickly loads all the data from the saved file. However, if you don’t leave your PC constantly running when you’re not using it, you have an SSD (which uses less power than a mechanical drive) or you’re happy to rely on Sleep mode instead, the ‘Hiberfil.sys’ file simply wastes valuable space.
To find out how much space Hibernate uses, type cmd in the Windows search box and choose ‘Run as administrator’ under Command Prompt. When Command Prompt opens, type the following command and press Enter: dir c:\ /as (replace ‘c:\’ with your main drive’s letter if different). Look at the ‘hiberfil.sys’ line to see the amount of storage the file consumes – nearly 6.8GB on our PC ( 1 in our screenshot below).
To switch off Hibernate and free up space, type powercfg /h off into Command Prompt 2 and press Enter.
You won’t see confirmation that Hibernate is disabled, but you can check by typing powercfg /a and pressing Enter. You can turn it back on again by typing powercfg /h on into Command Prompt.