I’ve gotten the warning that I’m very low on disc space. It shows 120mb free out of 111gb. I’ve googled to find what to do but it hasn’t really helped. Many of the procedures say go [this folder] and do something, but there is no [this folder] on my computer. I did find some procedure that cleared a few small things, maybe to about 3gb free, but that didn’t last long. This is my area of ignorance and I’d appreciate any advice-for-dummies you can offer.
Lenovo all-in-one, Windows 7 Professional, Service Pack 1, 64 bit.
One quick option is to try the Disk Cleanup program in Windows.
Since you’re not on Windows 10 yet, you can download an open-source program called WinDirStat to examine your drive and see what is taking up all that space. That makes it easy to find stuff to delete. (Windows 10 users would need a newer program like TreeSize Free.)
First, check that C:\windows\temp is not filling up with garbage (sems to be a side effect of Windows updates failing, or something). I’ve seen cases where there were thousands of files in that folder. You can delete anything that windows will let you delete. Some files won’t delete because they are still open. If you suddenly find yourself with a lot less space than you used to have, this may be a culprit.
OTOH, 111GB is not a lot of space. Look at the following:
Clear cache in whatever internet browser you use. (Don’t delete cookies, that’s where your login info for some websites may be and typically cookies don’t use much space.)
Delete downloaded items - your user downloads folder.
Uninstall any major programs you no longer use.
Is there a hibernate file (C:\hiberfile.sys)? You probably don’t need that if space is an issue.
If you have a bigger D: drive, move some items there. You can move your swap file (pagefile.sys) there. That’s something for more technical, advanced users.
I too will suggest WinDirStat - you find all sorts of files you forgot you had.
Be very careful - don’t be deleting files and folders in C:\Windows unless you really understand what you are doing. (except for contents of “C:\Windows\temp”)
If it’s a desktop investigate adding a second disk to move your documents, music, and other personal data to. A laptop does not usually have space for a second drive. It may be possible to replace the drive with a bigger one, but moving the C: drive to a new drive is a highly technical piece of work.
Some such folders are hidden. If, for example, you explicitly type in the path to a folder, you will see it but you may not be able to just click your way to it (assuming that makes sense).
If like me you have a decade’s worth of old email, consider moving some of that to a USB storage to get it off your hard disk. If you have an email like GMail or Outlook.com where all your old email is on the server, your mail program may have an option like your phone, “only keep X weeks/months locally”
I was in a similar situation to you. When I first installed Windows 7 (it’s been awhile) I put it on a 120 GB SSD and had several TB on a mechanical drive for everything else. The SSD was reserved strictly for Windows.
Most software defaulted to my C drive. Some software would just install itself there anyway. Many different bits of software would also put their configuration files on the C drive.
If you’ve just been using default save locations, I’m suggesting your first order of business is to see if there isn’t something you can’t afford to uninstall.
Secondly, if you feel confident, is to browse to c:\users(your user ID)\appdata. AppData is often invisible but you can go there anyway.
Inside that are three folders: Local, LocalLow and Roaming, and data files often find their way in here with little rhyme or reason as to which one goes where. If there’s something you’ve uninstalled in the past, it may still have configuration files in there, which you can erase to reclaim space.
Honestly, uninstalling unneeded software will likely get you the best yields. The second step is only useful if you’ve played a lot of computer games and they had bulky save files.
Assuming you’ve done stuff like empty the trash, I found https://windirstat.net/ very helpful for quickly figuring out what kind of files were filling up my hard drive and what folders/programs they belonged to.
There is an option to show hidden files. Click that and they will appear. I have Win 10 now and don’t remember the exact way of doing it on Win 7.
A hint. Click on the header of the size column and get the biggest files displayed first. That keeps you from wasting time on trivial files, and looking at the biggest one. I just did that for Downloads, and quickly found a LibreOffice install file from last year that was 288 M. I’ve got plenty of space, but doing this saves time.
This is for the OP, not Dewey.
The fact the OP is down to 1/10th of one percent free space is very dangerous. Windows can start crashing at that point. But deleting stuff just because he doesn’t know what it is can break Windows far worse.
The OP knows his skill level looking under the hood of Windows. The rest of us don’t. Unless somebody can explain the purpose of every folder under, e.g. AppData, they don’t have any business looking in there.
There’s a disk cleanup tool built into Windows. That will clear out everything you can safely remove. After that the next step is to uninstall any leftover unused applications. If you have any such. Clearing the file cache in your browser is another safe tactic.
And next to start looking at what of your own files are taking up all the room. Too many downloaded reproductive biology documentaries (especially in HighDef) have a way of consuming a lot of harddrive space.
Once you know what sorts of your files are the problem and whether you want to keep them versus trash them forever, the next step is deciding where else you could put them, whether that’s the cloud, or another hard drive bought for archiving.
Strong recommend. The Disk Cleanup tool in Windows is safe and easy to use. There is no downside to running it. It’s quite likely it will free up a significant amount of space all by itself. It will check in hidden temp directories on its own without the need to manually uncover the directories.
WinDirStat is useful but an advanced tool. It doesn’t provide any inherent context as to the sizes it reports or whether files are safe to delete. As already suggested, if the OP is not comfortable manually exposing hidden folders accessing those locations through WinDirStat will not make it safer to do so.
Something else people sometimes do is download the same thing, or copy a file – often video or music, when they mean to move it. There are a number of “duplicate file finders”, and its even included as a tab on ccleaner, given above. When you discove you have dozens of the same image, or 3 of the same PDF, or several copies of a movie or music file, the you can first of all delete the redundant, and then you’ll be aware of what you’ve been doing, and stop doing it.
That’s what I came to suggest. A few years back one of the computers at my work started having a similar problem. Our work computers have very little in the way of large data files, other than system files. That is, there’s no music or movies or pictures or anything like that on them, at least nothing chewing up a hundred gigs of storage.
What was odd was that even after some disc cleanup, to free up enough space to stop getting the errors, it would fill right back up within a day or two. IIRC, I used WinDirStat to help narrow down the problem.
Ultimately, (again, IIRC, it was a few years ago), I cleaned up a few gigs of space, gave it a few days and then used file explorer to list ALL the files in chronological order. That made it easy to spot what the new files were. I don’t remember if it was failed updates that were continuously redownloading or a temp file issue or what.
In the end, I got an old computer frankensteined back together so I could pull the files off of the problem hard drive, formatted the original hard drive, reinstalled windows and put the files back on. I think, from ‘there’s something wrong with my computer’ to having it back in working order with all his files, took a week.
And that week included having it my house, with a webcam pointed at it. That way I could work on it at home, but I could also watch it when I was at work and run home when I could see that it needed my input (home and work only a few minutes apart).
In 2020, 111GB is not a big disk, and Windows 7 means your computer is 8-10 years old. (IIRC when I had Windows 7 I had a free upgrade to Windows 10 for a limited time but that opportunity is long gone.) Windows 7 system requirements alone include 16GB of disk, which is a huge chunk of your available space. It’s hard to give more specific advice without knowing what other software you have installed, and how you use your computer with what kind of data.
I use WinDirStat but you have to know what is safe to delete. Typically one of the largest files is a paging file and you don’t want to just wipe that out. But you may find other deadwood that you know you don’t want, like a movie you downloaded 8 years ago. You can go into Windows settings to lower the size of the paging file, which can dramatically increase available space, but it may also degrade performance in other ways.
Why? I use WinDirStat on Windows 10 and it runs like a champ.
Last I knew, WinDirStat didn’t like the new C drive permission changes in Windows 10 and it hadn’t been updated since 2007. If it works now, that’s great since it is the best. Maybe it always worked and I’m out to lunch.