If you haven’t cleaned your files in a while and are letting the drives run red, you can face some serious performance issues with your laptop. When your hard drive is filled up to the brim, it starts processing programs slowly and consumes more power.
If you have been experiencing lag, program crashes, and difficulty moving files, then it means you need to clean your hard drive and create more space on it. If you want to free up space without deleting your precious data, then there are several ways of doing it. In this article, I have mentioned a few simple tips that will help you free up more space on your hard drive.
Get Rid of Apps Your Rarely Use
The first thing you need to do is get rid of the apps that you barely use. It happens to all of us; we install an application we need to use only a couple of times, and then we forget about it completely. We keep repeating this with other apps and don’t even realize it until our hard drive is full. That is why you must get rid of the apps you don’t need anymore to create some extra space on your laptop. You can do that by opening the control panel and choosing the “Manage Programs” option. You will be able to see all the apps there that are installed on your laptop.
Compress Files
Another great way of creating more space on your laptop is to compress files. A lot of files we use are too big in size, and some of them can use a bit of shredding. You can use programs like 7zip and Winrar to store files that you don’t use often and can create more space on your hard drive. You can also compress your documents and can reduce their size significantly with the help of Soda PDF. To download the app, you can go to SodaPDF by clicking on the highlighted text.
Use Disk Cleanup
The disk cleanup tool comes pre-installed in Windows 10, and it can prove quite handy when it comes to freeing up storage space. The tool recognizes the files that your laptop no longer needs and deletes them automatically to free up space.
Windows is always creating new temporary files to carry out certain functions and run programs on your laptop. A lot of these files don’t get deleted, and they stay hidden for a long time. The disk cleanup tool identifies those files and helps you get rid of them for good.
Clean the “Download” Folder
A lot of people have tons of data stored in their download folder, and the majority of those files are useless for your laptop. We download several files every day while browsing the web and forget to delete them. Over the course of time, the files keep piling up, and the folder becomes messy. It is advised that you scan your download folder and delete all the files that you don’t need anymore.