Ninite’s WinDirStat is also a great disk usage viewer and cleanup program but can seem overwhelming at first glance due to its visual aid. The CCleaner Professional Plus bundles add disk defragmentation, file recovery, and hardware inventory on top of the features of CCleaner Professional. CCleaner Professional allows scheduled cleaning, privacy protection, real-time monitoring, and support. The free version works great to clear up disk space in a jiffy without having to go through a bunch of individual steps. This program comes in three different bundles. Piriform’s CCleaner is a great PC optimization tool for beginners and up, with advanced features for the more tech-savvy users. Use a Program Designed for Quick PC Cleanup Windows Disk Cleaner should clear out your browser cache already, but if you don’t want to run Disk Cleaner or if you have a Mac, going into your browsers, going to the History tab, and clearing the cookies, cache, temporary files, and downloads will clear up a little more space ( but probably not that much). While you’re in those programs, take the time to clear out the downloads folders as well. Keep in mind that iPhoto, iMovie, and Mail have their own separate Trash Cans on your Mac, so just clearing the one on your desktop won’t remove all the deleted files. Like Windows Disk Cleanup, you can remove temporary files that are unnecessarily taking up space on your Apple. Clearing your temporary internet files, recycle bin, and other temporary files can free up a good bit of space, depending on how good you are about cleaning those out on a regular basis.ĭoing this should clean out your Recycle Bin as well. Search for it from the taskbar, and then select file types under Files to Delete. To gain back some of that disk space on a Windows computer, you can run Disk Cleanup. Having a hard time choosing the right one? Check out our article on personal backup solutions. You might misplace an external hard drive, but you can’t misplace a cloud account.

Those files don’t have to stay on your computer if you have an external hard drive or cloud storage, you can keep them there and access them that way when you need them again.įor those of you who want to keep the gadget and tech clutter down, I recommend using a cloud service.

We all have files we want to keep that we haven’t opened in almost a year ( or longer).

Move Inessential Files to an External Hard Drive or Cloud Service So how do you clear more room without deleting the essentials? Here are five ways to do that hard drive spring cleaning. A message on your computer warning you that you’re running out of disk space. Your computer is running slower, booting it up is now taking long enough for you to get yourself another cup of coffee, and then you see it.

Clear up hard drive space mac