How to Free Up Disk Space on Windows: Complete Guide

Find out what's using your space first

Open Settings → System → Storage. Windows shows a breakdown by category — usually Apps & features, Temporary files, and Other dominate. Work through the biggest categories first.

1. Run Storage Sense

In the Storage page, click Storage Sense, enable it, and click Run Storage Sense now. It deletes recycle bin contents, old temp files and stale downloads automatically.

2. Clear temporary files manually

Storage → Temporary files → tick everything you're comfortable with (Windows Update Cleanup is safe and often huge). Click Remove files.

3. Clean up with Disk Cleanup (classic)

1. Press Win+R, type cleanmgr, press Enter.
2. Select the drive, then Clean up system files.
3. Tick Windows Update Cleanup, Previous Windows installations (this alone can be 20+ GB after an upgrade) and Thumbnails.

4. Uninstall unused apps and games

Storage → Installed apps, sort by Size. Be honest about what you actually use. Games you haven't launched in a year are the usual multi-gigabyte offenders.

5. Move files to another drive or the cloud

Move Documents, Pictures and Videos to a secondary drive: right-click the folder → Properties → Location → Move. For cloud, enable OneDrive Files On-Demand so files download only when opened.

6. Shrink hibernation and pagefile (advanced)

If you never hibernate, run as admin: powercfg /h off — reclaims space equal to your RAM size. Leave the pagefile alone unless you know exactly what you're doing.

7. Find large files with a tool

Tools like WizTree (free, in our Download Center) show a visual treemap of every folder in seconds — you'll instantly spot the 40 GB mystery folder.

Need help?

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