YOU WILL NEED Some or all of the following tools: Bulk Crap Uninstaller, CCleaner, TreeSize Free, Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder, SteamMover (all free)
The emergence of smaller, faster boot drives has resurrected an age-old problem: how to stop your hard drives from filling to capacity. What wasn’t such an issue with a 2TB drive is now a hot topic as you struggle to maintain Windows 11 and your apps on a super-speedy 256GB NVMe boot drive. In this tutorial, we’ll reveal a range of tips, techniques, and tools to help you bring back some semblance of order to your drive’s contents while ensuring you have plenty of room to allow your personal files to sit side-by-side with Windows, your games, and other apps.
We’ll start with a quick tour of Windows’ own cleaning tools – all conveniently accessible via the System > Storage section of Settings – before going deeper and using the best free tools to thoroughly remove multiple apps in one go, perform a deep clean of areas Storage Sense couldn’t reach, plus help thin out your gargantuan photo collection so only the best version of each photo is kept. And if that still isn’t enough to free up the space you need, discover how to safely move apps to another drive with just a few clicks.
Get an overview
Start your cleanup by opening Settings and navigating to System > Storage. You’ll see a bar chart revealing your system disk’s current capacity and how much space has been filled. Beneath this is a list of categories revealing where much of that space has gone – Apps & Features, Other, and Temporary files. Click one for a more detailed look or click ‘Show more categories’ for additional views of your personal files, the desktop, and OneDrive storage.
