How to free up space in c drive windows 7

Please read carefully and with all things you find on a random blog, be careful because you have no one to blame but yourself. However, if you take a few minutes, read carefully and do even a few of these tips or just run Disk Cleanup, you'll get lots of space back. While your are in there, why not do some more maintenance on your machine, blow out that dust and install some updates? Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee.

He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way. Sponsored By. About Scott Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee.

About Newsletter. Hosting By. Share on Twitter or Facebook or use the Permalink. November 26, Hey Scott, really nice tips.

WinDirStat in particular, is great. Raul Popescu. Man, the day you get a solution to clean the winsxs directory, you'll get surely the peace nobel prize.

I am quite anal when it comes to cleaning up disk space as I run a lot of virtual environments on very expensive and limited SSD drives. I can't wait for the Data Deduplication feature that ships with the next version of Windows Server. CCleaner does do a pretty good job and takes care of most of the points in your post. It also gets rid of many other space hogs such as IIS log files, which tend to grow a lot if you are doing a lot of development.

Jeroen Ritmeijer. CCleaner does a great job on lots of known apps like the various browsers, cleaning up cache and compacting their internal databases. Hi Scott, Another great article, thanks! Did you know that HDGraph 1. Folder size win32 is a great small no dependency program for visually see whats taking space.

Mattias Karlsson. This saves a lot of space. Also uninstall older updates like older and replace IE updates. Just a couple of notes. Just hit your Windows key, type in "disk", find the entry, right click, and choose "Run as administrator". Also you should open up your command prompt for any commands in administrator mode as well. James Manning.

Another tip that's not on the list, but is quite the disk space saver is the following. On next boot the pagefile.

Ivan Zlatev. I'm fond of Disk Space Fan - not open source, but has a free version and looks pretty. To begin with, launch the Disk Management application on Windows. You can find it from the Start menu. As the Disk Management window will open, you can view the storage allocated to each partition and the available free space as well.

This will launch a dedicated Extend Volume Wizard that you can run by following a simple click-through process. From here, you can select the available space and add it to the C drive.

Please note that if the free space is not available, then you can create it from the Disk Management application. You can do this by defragmenting the disk or removing the free space from any other partition. If you have an old or broken hard drive, then it might get tough to extract data from it.

In case if you can't simply copy your files from it the usual way, then try a dedicated recovery solution instead. Wondershare Recoverit Data Recovery is a professional tool that is recommended by experts to extract the lost content from a hard drive. Therefore, if you have lost or deleted your files from the C drive, then consider using Recoverit immediately.

The sooner you run it, the better results you are expected to get. Also, it features an extremely simple user interface, which does not require any technical background. You can just download it on your Windows PC for free by visiting its website and follow these steps.

Firstly, launch the Recoverit Data Recovery application on your system, and from its home, select a location to scan. If you want, you can select the entire C drive partition or browse to a specific folder to extract lost data from it. Once the target location is selected, click on the "Start" button and wait for a few minutes while Recoverit would scan it.

You can view the progress of the scan on the interface and even pause it whenever you want. To get the maximum output, let the application run the complete scan. That's it! After when the scan is over, all the extracted content will be listed under different file types and folders. You can switch between them from the sidebar and get a preview of your photos, videos, documents, etc. Now, just pick the files you wish to get back and click on the "Recover" button. Make sure you get off this data to a trusted location in the end.

Apart from that, you should also make a habit of checking the storage of C drive regularly. There are plenty of ways to do this. Also, you can go to My Computer and right-click the C drive icon. As soon as you think the free space is limited, take preventive measures to clean up C drive. This brings up to the conclusion of this in-depth guide on how to clean C drive in Windows 7 and To help you, we have listed not one, but 10 different options to clear space on C drive.

Not just that — the guide also lists a smart and fast solution to recover data from your computer as well. The ball is in your court now! Go ahead and try some of these suggestions to free up space on C drive. If you also have some tips on how to increase C drive space, then why not share them with us in the comments below. If your volume C is part of a larger partitioned device, it is possible to expand the size of the volume using unallocated space on the device.

However, this process is not always straightforward as the order of the partitions is important. The "Extend Volume" option in Disk Management only allows you to extend volumes using the unallocated space next to it.

This means that you cannot extend the volume if there is a joint partition that is not unallocated. Click the Adjust button to extend it. When turning to Manual Adjustment, select the C drive, and drag dots rightward to add more space to C drive. Click "OK" to confirm. Click the "Execute Operation" button at the top corner and start all pending operations by clicking "Apply". Mostly, useless large junk files, big files, huge installed programs, and temporary files are taking up the most space in your system C drive after using your PC for a long time.

So the other effective method you can try is to free up hard disk space. Disk Cleanup is a Windows built-in tool that you can apply to delete some files so as to free up disk space via Windows File Explorer. Follow the steps below to free up disk space on your C drive:. If Windows installation files Windows. This will help to free up a huge space in C: drive.

As you know that temporary files generated by Windows OS may also take up huge space on the system C: drive. You can also try to delete the temporary files so as to resolve the C drive full issue.

Some steps to delete the Temp files on different Windows OS may differ:. Step 4: Check the box of content you want to remove and click on the Remove files button.

Select its content, right-click unwanted files that are taking most storage space and select "Delete" to remove the files and folders. Step 3: Select temporary files, log files, Recycle Bin, and other useless files that you want to delete and click "OK". Another method that you can try is to empty the Recycle Bin timely. Windows to save the deleted files in the Recycle Bin for a period 30 days or even longer by default.

If you never cleared the recycle bin, it will take up a certain space on your system C drive, which as a result, your C drive is getting full. So we suggest you empty the recycle bin regularly.

Note that before you start, check the recycle bin and make sure you have restored some important deleted files back to its original location.

From administrative command prompt, type "powercfg -h off" to get that space back. Don't turn it off if you use the feature. Windows 7 keeps backups of lots of system files every time something major such as driver installation and software installations happens, and after a while this can take up lots of space.

You may completely turn it off to release all disk space or decrease the space usage for System Restore. Click Configure in System Protection tab, there are 3 options and select one, you can adjust the maximum disk space usage or system protection by dragging on Max Usage bar.

Turning off system protection won't delete all restore points automatically, to do this, you should click the Delete button on the bottom. Page file is used by Windows as RAM and it's located in C drive by default, you can decrease it or set it to other volume.

Consider uninstall the programs that you no longer or seldom use, the more program uninstalled, the more disk space will be released. Some program such as Games, Projects and Videos output very large files, you may modify the default output path to other volume and transfer these files to new locations.

This is a great feature of NTFS files system. If you've got a bunch of folders with old crap in them, but you don't want to delete them, then consider compressing them to save disk space. To do this, right click C drive and click Properties , click the check-box of Compress this drive to save disk space. To a Windows 7 computer that never free up disk space, you may reclaim over 10 Gigabytes disk space, however, this is not the final step.

Many people feedback that C drive becomes full again after freeing up disk space.