Thankfully there are much better solutions for how to find out what files and folders are taking up hard drive space, and here’s a selection of 8 free tools to do just that.

This could certainly waste a lot of time and isn’t an efficient method. The normal thing to do would be to check the properties of each top level folder and navigate your way down until the culprit files and folders are found. Other locations on the drive might have been filled with data that you or most cleaning programs wouldn’t normally look in. Even if you have the operating system on an SSD or an NVMe drive, Windows will still slow down and misbehave if it runs out of available space. Uninstalling old software might free up some more space depending on how many useless programs are installed.Įven after doing those things, a system might still be left with less than 10% of free space remaining and Windows doesn’t really like that.

That will help remove all the junk and temp files that can take up several Gigabytes on badly affected systems. When someone tells you they’re running out of hard drive space, the first thing you would probably tell them to do is to clean up the system using a program such as CCleaner.

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