How to Clear Space on Your Hard Drive on Windows 10 - 4 Ways

Reasons for clearing hard drive space on PC

In forums, hard drive getting full (especially the C drive) is a common issue that many Windows users talk about. In most cases, C drive is the disk where the system is installed on the computer. Because of reasons such as many files storing in it by default and the partition size allocation being unreasonable, many users will receive a low disk space warning.

If you do not clear hard drive space on PC in time, it will cause the failure of software installation, the computer to slow down, or even the computer freeze. Therefore, you need to learn how to clear space on your hard drive on Windows 10.

How to clear drive space on Windows 10

Since the lack of space on the PC hard drive will have a negative impact on the user’s use of it, we will introduce 4 methods on how to clear drive space on Windows 10.

│Tip 1. Change settings of Recycle Bin

Deleting unwanted files will migrate them to the Recycle Bin, but they are not immediately cleaned from the computer's hard drive. Thus, in order to clean up PC hard drive space, you can set the Recycle Bin to clean up unnecessary files directly.

Step 1. Locate and right-click the Recycle Bin icon on the desktop, and select "Properties".

Step 2. In the pop-up window, reset the "Maximum Size" or directly select "Don't move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediately when deleted".

│Tip 2. Free up space with NTFS compression

If you have many large files on your computer's hard drive, you can try compressing these files or folders. Please refer to the following steps on how to clear space on Windows 10 C drive:

Step 1. Click "This PC" and open File Explorer, then right-click the target drive and select "Properties".

Step 2. Check "Compress this drive to save disk space" and click "Apply".

Step 3. When prompted to confirm attribute changes, check "Apply changes to drive, subfolders and files" and then click "OK". Finally, activate NTFS compression on the drive.

│Tip 3. Remove temporary users

If someone else has logged into the computer with a Windows account, you can also delete users who no longer use the device to free up the PC hard drive.

Step 1. Open "Settings", click "Accounts" and "Family & other users" in sequence. Then select the account you no longer use and click "Remove".

Step 2. In the small window that pops up, click "Delete account and data".

Cleaning up drive space on Windows 10 with a powerful PC cleaner (hot)

There is no doubt that the above method can free up some PC hard drive space. However, they cannot completely remove all junk files and some vaguely defined files in the computer. At this time, you can use a powerful computer cleaner - AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional.

This professional hard drive space cleaner has set up a special column for cleaning the computer hard drive, and you can free up space of PC hard drive in a clean interface:

✎ PC Cleaner: It can scan and completely delete junk files in the computer.

✎ Delete large files: It can identify which large files in the computer can be deleted and remove them permanently.

✎ App Mover: It gives you the ability to migrate applications to another drive without losing data.

PS.: In addition to the functions of cleaning up PC hard drive, you can also use many advanced functions, such as migrate OS to SSD, allocate free space, convert dynamic disk to basic, etc.

Let's experience how do I clear up space on my hard drive with this tool.

│Case 1. Delete large files

How to clear hard drive space on PC deeply? First, you can use the "Delete Large Files" function to scan your computer, find and screen out some large files that can be deleted to clear hard drive space on PC.

Step 1. Open the AOMEI Demo, then please click "Free up" and "Delete Large Files".

Step 2. Choose the disk you want scan for large files and click "Start Scan".

Step 3. You can see all the large files on the target drive, select the large files you want to remove and click "Delete".

Step 4. Click "Delete Now" to delete all the large files selected.

│Case 2. Move applications to another drive (Supplement)

When there is not enough space in a certain drive in the computer, don't worry! "App Mover" can migrate various files or installed programs in one hard drive to another drive without reinstalling.

Step 1. Click "Free up" and "App Mover" in the main interface.

Step 2. You have two choices: "App Mover" and "Move Folders", we take "App Mover" as an example.

Step 3. Select the drive where target applications located, then click "Next".

Step 4. Choose the programs you want to move and select the destination drive, then click "Move".

Step 5. Click "OK" to complement the movement of selected programs.

Tidy up

How to clear space on your hard drive on Windows 10? In this article, we discussed reasons to clear a hard drive and how to do it with 4 methods. If you are interested in the method shared in the article, please operate according to the specific situation.

By the way, we also offer the Server Edition exclusively for Windows Server users.