Windows 7 Running out of Space

[Deanna H]

I just now noticed it says under Hard Disk OS(C 169GB free of 684 GB. I have no clue how much free space I have left, is 168 GB not very much space? Also is there any way to free up. I did delete all my Downloaded videos, I know they were taking alot of space, that is when it said 169GB. Any help or info would be much appreciated, I can follow directions well, if it is explained to me. Thanks Deanna

 

[nmsuk]

Try the disk cleanup wizard. From the Start button menu, choose All Programs→Accessories→System Tools→Disk Cleanup

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Hi,
169GB isn't that much space on a 750GB drive which you have; about 25% used capacity available on that drive. 75% free space which is still plenty of room. Windows doesn't start misbehaving until you get to <25% free space. If you run Disk Cleanup and don't get at least 10% reduction in used space (about 16.8GB), chances are you have a lot of junk in there such as old programs that can't be easily removed, and tons of wasted registry entries. I recommend you use CCleaner to get rid of that, a free utility from piriform.com. Also, you should check your Recycle Bin after the disk cleanup to make sure it's indeed empty. If it's not, attempt to empty it all. If you cannot, CCleaner may be able to get what's left. If you're able to get to 152GB or less total used space after running both of these utilities, that machine you have is 8 years old this year, and you've accumulated a whole lot of stuff in your Windows that may not be cleanable. Usually, the only way to fix this is to do a W7 reinstallation from Recovery Media (DVD discs or USB stick) or from Partition Recovery. And, prior to doing this, you need to backup all your personal data to external media prior to attempting this, as the Recovery process will erase everything on your drive including all programs installed from the factory, and all programs you installed yourself since you purchased the machine, along with all documents, photos, music, videos, E-mails etc.

If you've never attempted this yourself, I recommend you pay a licensed Tech to do for you at your local repair shop. You should see significant reduction in used space on the drive after doing so, probably 25-50% reduction or more. If you are planning on storing a whole bunch of stuff on your C: drive after your cleanup, you may want to purchase a 2nd hard drive or even better an external hard drive or flash drive and leave that C: drive as is. Even with a laptop, external drives are cheap, and can easily be packed into your laptop case when you leave home. You can also store your date on Cloud Account storage such as OneDrive, GoogleDrive, or Dropbox to have access from outside your home when you travel.

From what you have said, the amount of space you have used is currently not impacting the way Windows works, nor will it be for probably 6 months or more and that assumes that you are adding 85GB of new data to that drive each month for the next 6 months--pretty unlikely. As long as you don't exceed the 25% free space rule I mentioned above, you can continue using that computer for several years.

Best,
<<BIGBEARJEDI>>

 

[Deanna H]

Thank you, I do alot of graphic work. Also have alot of folders stored on my pc, that containimages, scrapkits, etc. If I get rid of most of these folders (most likely will burn them) than remove, will this free up alot of space. I also download alot of movies, but I did delete all of the file folders for them. I used the Diisc cleanup, so I did go from 169 GB to 180, but that didn't seem like alot to me. Thanks for your answer.

 

[Megamanx]

Thank you, I do alot of graphic work. Also have alot of folders stored on my pc, that containimages, scrapkits, etc. If I get rid of most of these folders (most likely will burn them) than remove, will this free up alot of space. I also download alot of movies, but I did delete all of the file folders for them. I used the Diisc cleanup, so I did go from 169 GB to 180, but that didn't seem like alot to me. Thanks for your answer.

Well, the easiest way to see any app or any system that use your space is by using an app called Tree Size. It could show you every folder on your system and how much it eats your storage. I have 32 GB storage and i used this app a lot to see where is my space is gone.

 

[Deanna H]

I did try the Tree Size, I know it is a simple little tool, but I had a problem understanding. I went m y own way, got rid of all the downloads in my download folder, the desktop DropBox, the Desktop Fotki. I am now up to 200GB of free space.I have over (well over) 1200 folders in my Documents, I am going to burn only the ones I need to keep, and delete the rest. Thanks for your suggestion.

 

[Deanna H]

I found a Temp folder with all the movies I have burned and converted, and I decided to shred the folder. It has been shredding now for 12 hours, and still not empty. Is it normal to take this long.I have gone from 169GB to almost 300GB since starting this, which is great storage wise, I just hope I am not messing anything else up lol. Thanks....

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Hi Deanna,
You're welcome. Always glad to try and help. It's what we do. I think you're are going in the right direction. Not sure what shredding tool you are actually using, Microsoft or 3rd party, but if you have that large number of nested folders, they can take longer to shred or delete than than the average bunch of junk sitting there. A 750GB hard drive can take a while to do anything, disk maintenance, testing, remap repair, and can often take overnight; I just did a 1TB and it took close to 24 hrs. So don't give up on it until you get to about 30 hrs. If it goes longer than that, chances are your shredding utility hit a snag and is simply not smart enough to give you an error message. If you look at the Title bar of the shredding program you are using and it says "..Not Responding"; it's probably hung up and you need to restart it and possibly use some other tools to help with the cleanup task. Also, large numbers of folders in your Recycle Bin especially with large files such as videos or movies in the >1GB range, can really slow down shredding or cleanup utilities.
I recommend you use a combination of these 3 free utilities to further your cleanup effort:
1. CCleaner from piriform.com (do Not use the Registry cleanup tool!).
2. Disk Cleanup, built in to your Win7 OS.
3. SAFEMODE Defraggler, also from piriform.com

A word of advice here, before you attempt to do a deeper cleaning of your hard drive, it's best that you FIRST BACKUP ALL YOUR PERSONAL DATA (LIBRARY FOLDERS) TO EXTERNAL MEDIA TO AVOID IRRETRIEVABLE DATA LOSS SHOULD SOMETHING GO WRONG!!!

Make sure that you have run all the cleanup tools you can and you are satisfied with the resulting space saving before you run the DEFRAGGLER program. It will properly organize and defrag your hard drive, even though it's not really necessary in W7 and newer windows computers. It can cut anywhere from 15 sec. to 3 min. off your boot time when you first turn your computer on. I find that to be helpful for most of my customers; and it also makes a difference when you are using programs like your browsers loading one page after another with multiple windows open. If you need help getting your computer into SAFE MODE, you can search for help on that on this forum, or google it. There are lots of YouTube videos that show you how to do it, and you can probably find a video for your brand PC (Dell, HP, Samsung, Toshiba, etc.).

Best of luck,
<<BBJ>>

 

[Deanna H]

I am using IObit file shredder. I did use the CC cleaner, and it did not do very much . 299GB free of 684GB is what it is now reading and still shredding. As far as my startup time, it is 45sec., I do not know if that is good or what. I am satisfied at the free space I am getting now, the thing is after I deleted my movies, and than shred the files in my recycle bin, that is when I noticed I was somehow using alot of space somewhere, and Temporay Files came to mind. These files that are now shredding are files from my DVD burning author,files that were converted to MP4, I did not know they were going into a tempory file. Is there a way to direct them to a file of my choice, from now on? (sorry for the long way around to explain this, BTW.