Disk Cleanup Tips in Windows

Now, the desktop hard disk provides TB of storage capacity is almost the price of pocket money, the computer also generally with hundreds of thousands of GB of capacity. However, many of us today feel the pinch of space. We are building increasingly large photo and movie libraries, and modern desktop systems are often equipped with a secondary mechanical disk for data storage, but compact laptops and tablets simply don't have the space for a second hard drive. There are a number of ways to make room for space by finding and eliminating unnecessary files, reducing the amount of space required by Windows itself. You may be amazed at the amount of space that can be freed.

Looking for alternate disk space

Whether you can make more drives increase their capacity before you start deleting files. After a period of use the system can contain one or more unnecessary partitions-perhaps an old Ubuntu installation, or, if you are using a Macbook,boot camp partition. Such partitions can easily remove their reclaimed space. Many devices also have a recovery partition that you can choose to delete. To delete a partition, you will be using the Disk Management console. Search windows for "Create and format hard disk Partitions": find it, in the Open window, click on your system disk. If you see an unwanted partition, just right-click and select "Format" to delete it. Then, assimilate you just released to primary windows disk space, right-click on the system partition, select expand Volume, and then select the maximum available extension.

Needless to say, you should back up the data you need before you delete the partition. Once you've incorporated the space into your primary system partition, there's no easy way to recover the data it contains. We should also point out that all partitions operate on a small risk factor: The partitioning error before the reorganization, you may want to check your disk, if you are using a battery-powered device, make sure it is connected to the power supply before embarking on any repartition tasks.

Remove unnecessary applications

Now that your free space is maximized, the next step is to clear any programs you don't need. To do this, go to the Control Panel, open the Programs and features window, and see a list of installed software. The size column shows that each application occupies an entire disk-something that is often dispersed across multiple disk locations in the total size of the program files. It is easy to see if an application takes up too much space and decides whether to uninstall it-or, if it is a modular installation, just remove some components. The complete installation package for Microsoft office and Adobe Creative Suite can take up several gigabytes of space, but can cut requirements if you reduce the components you need to install. Of course, ideally, you should remove all unnecessary applications, but either large or small. Even if you save the smallest amount of space, removing unwanted software can make it safe for you to protect yourself from many vulnerabilities.

Clean up the remaining files

The next step is to clear the unnecessary files on the disk, which you can clear by hand, but we do not recommend doing so. A more efficient way to use the Windows built-in tools to defragment the disk. This frees up up to a few gigabytes of space, automatically removing all kinds of digital debris, including log files and Windows file history entries.

When you start the program for the first time, you will see that not all of these options are activated by default. If you click the "Clean System Files" button, the other admin cleanup options will become available. But there are also options that should be used with care. One example is the "Previous Windows installation" option: If you have selected this option from an older version of Windows, tell "Disk Cleanup" to remove the Windows.old folder that contains your old system file upgrades. This may sound like a good idea, but it also contains your old desktop and personal folders. If you have not copied all the old data, check the Windows.old folder before allowing "Disk Cleanup" to remove its possible user directory. The Disk Cleanup interface includes a shortcut to System Restore settings, from where you can remove old restore points and save more space-you will find more options for tabs under the buttons. Depending on how you use your computer, this can clean up thousands of megabytes, but it's only temporary. Over time, System Restore will continue to track changes to your computer and build the database again, by default, consumes 5% of your hard disk space.

If you want to restore the storage limit used by the system, open its Settings window-under System protection you will find it in the System Properties Control Panel item-click Configure. You will see a slider that can be dialed back to the lowest of 1%. To make sure you have eliminated every unnecessary file from your computer, you can consider a Third-party Disk Cleanup tool.

Find unnecessary personal files

Now is the time to take the purge of your own data files, or to check any large can be safely deleted or archived to an external disk. This seems to be a daunting task, and personal files often end up scattered in multiple locations or buried in subfolders. Happily, there is a popular tool that can easily see your space already. This is a free, open source tool called WinDirStat (for Windows Catalog statistics).

Install the software, run it, it points to your system drive and then clicks OK: The tool will perform a thorough scan and no more than a few minutes will produce a wide variety of colored rectangles representing your disk, a visual map, along with the style of the interface window in the upper part of the tree.

It's easy to read the WinDirStat map. Each rectangle represents a single file, its size reflects how many disks it occupies and its color displays its file name extension, so you can see at a glance, either (for example) an ISO disk image or an AVI video. Click on a rectangle and you will see it highlighted in the Directory tree pane, showing its location on disk, its size, and various other performance.

In this way, you can quickly identify the largest file on your hard disk and make a decision on whether you want to keep each one (delete a file, its name in the tree view right mouse button and choose "Delete" from the context menu). A lot to note is that you will find that the system files cannot be deleted directly, especially the two largest files that you may see Pagefile.sys and Hiberfil.sys, which we will discuss below.

Removing your biggest personal file can generate considerable space savings, just click a few, but if you have a large file folder, each small isolated, but a big waste of space for the whole? This will not be as obvious as the WinDirStat map view, but you can easily find it looking at the tree view. By default, this indicates that all folders under the root of your hard disk are sorted in order of size--usually the top three entries may be in your windows, users and Programs folder. The column to the right of the folder name shows what proportion of your disk usage is represented for each folder, in gigabytes of absolute size.

Click on the user and you will see the white border appearing on the map to show the extent of all its content. Click the "+" icon in the tree view and you will see a subfolder of the user, sorted again in order of size (with the "file" item, which indicates the size of the file in that folder). By drilling down to the folder structure, you will be able to find and audit folders that take up most of the space.

If you want to remove unnecessary profiles for each byte, you may want to go through Windows Explorer, access your desktop, your download folder, and your library to carry out manual measurements to complete. This may not have a big impact because any particularly large files and folders have been brought to windirstat your attention, but get rid of the smaller unnecessary files to keep neat and clean. Don't forget to empty the Recycle Bin when you're finished-an obvious hint, but it's easy to overlook one.

WinDirStat is not the only tool, its type: a popular free alternative to software Uderzo SpaceSniffer. This will create a map similar to WinDirStat, and a direct rectangular label, so you can get a high-level overview of the file distribution at a glance. However, we found that it's layered approach-this requires you to click into the folder to view its content-it is not easy to trace the wasted space of the file.

Hibernate files and Paging files

Hiberfil.sys and Pagefile.sys files may be found on your PC. You can't delete these files directly, but it can get rid of one, shrink.

, you can delete Hiberfil.sys-a container file, the content stored in your RAM, when your computer goes into hibernation mode (you will find that its size is exactly the same as for your computer's physical memory). You can get rid of it by disabling the Hibernate feature of Windows, of course, although this means losing a potentially useful power saving function.

To achieve this, all you have to do is open an elevated command prompt (Cmd.exe search, right-click the icon, select "Run as Administrator"), and enter the command POWERCFG/hibernate shutdown. This will remove the Hiberfil.sys and immediately release its disk space.

Pagefile.sys works the same way: This is a file that Windows uses virtual memory, so it's an extension of your physical memory. If you use the default settings, this file can grow and shrink, but the size of your physical memory, it is usually an important part. If you are stuck in a 64GB ssd,4gb page file is useless.

You can manually set the paging file size, access the Advanced tab of the System properties, click the Top Settings button (performance section of the interface), and then click "Advanced" | " Change ... to uncheck the size in the automatically manage paging files all drives box.

Now you can click Custom Size to specify the maximum size of your paging file, or you can click "No paging File" to completely get rid of the Pagefile.sys. Once you have made your choice, click "Settings" and "OK" to apply the new value. When you restart Windows the next time, the paging file is shrunk or disappears, freeing up disk space.

To know that there is little or no virtual memory, running Windows is not a good idea. It increases the risk of Windows running memory, at some point-contingencies can cause operating systems and applications to crash or occur unexpectedly. If your computing needs are moderate, however, you are likely to be able to disable the paging file without problems, especially if you are using a system, 8GB or 16GB of RAM, which goes far beyond the most modern application requirements.

You cannot delete the system folder

To explore the disk unwanted files, you may notice a large folder inside the Windows folder called WinSxS. This may take more than 10GB, obviously inside, you will find a large number of subfolders, each containing very few system resources such as DLLs, driver files, and so on-many of them duplicate files found elsewhere in your PC. This may look like a huge waste of space, but in reality things are not so bad as they appear.

Explanation, the WinSxS folder is introduced in Vista by the system called "Side Side", which can simultaneously install multiple versions of the system files-"DLL Hell" of the old problem, in different application requirements for the solution of a portion of the conflicting version of the resource. The WinSxS folder is now used as all Windows system components, including multiple versions of DLLs, which are installed central repositories. These components are all linked-copied-to the appropriate location on your hard disk; Therefore, while your Windows folder may appear with many redundant system files, in reality there is only one physical copy of each file on the disk, and no space is wasted.

When you can't get rid of the WinSxS folder, you may be able to shrink it if it contains outdated versions and no longer need the files. To do this, you can use the Microsoft DISM tool: Simply enter the following command at an elevated command prompt:

DISM//Cleanup image/spsuperseded

DISM//Cleanup image/Startcomponentcleanup

This will completely remove any backup and legacy components, and the service pack is installed instead. You need to restart Windows once it is run, but it is worth doing things: on our test PC we see the WinSxS folder shrink 10.6GB 9.3GB.

You may see another larger folder is SysWOW64: This is found only on 64-bit systems, containing components that need to run 32-bit software on 64-bit operating systems (this name represents "Windows 64 Windows"). The folder may take about 1000 megabytes, but even if you only run 64-bit applications, it is considered a necessary system folder and Windows will not let you delete it. If you need to install Windows on a very small number of storage devices, you may want to consider using a 32-bit version to save space.