Declutter your hard drive in 8 easy steps

Over time and with Windows 10 perpetually updating its system files, unnecessary junk accumulates in your hard disk. The bulk of it consists of remnants from system upgrades, discarded files in the recycle bin, temporary files stored by the browser and several others. At first, this problem may not be noticeable, but with time, it will take up a few GBs of space.

Mind, this problem won’t hinder your PC’s performance in any way, but will take up valuable space, especially if the system is operating off of a low capacity SSD. But fret not, there is a simple method to mitigate this problem.

However, it’s important to note that this isn’t an automated process and from time to time, this type of ‘spring cleaning’ will need to be repeated.

Here are the steps you should take to de-clutter your hard disk:

Step 1: On Windows 10, right click on the Windows Start logo. A pop-up menu should appear, select File Explorer.

Step 2: On the right hand corner of the File Explorer window, there will be a list of locations, folders and listed drives. Click on ‘This PC‘.

Step 3: Hover your cursor over your Local Drive, usually (C:), and right click.

Step 4: Select properties. This action should launch a new window, with several tabs and preferences.

Step 5: Click on Disk Clean Up, which should be in the middle right and corner of said window.

Step 6: This in turn, should launch another window called Disc Cleanup for (C:). Click on the ‘Clean up system files’ button at the bottom. And allow the computer to assess the used space.

Step 7: You should now see a list of entries with their respective occupied storage space. This gives you an overview of the unnecessary files.

Step 8: If there isn’t anything important here, check all the boxes and click on the ‘OK’ button. This action will delete the selected files and clears your hard disk of unwanted clutter.

Disclaimer: Before attempting Step 8, make sure that files residing in the Recycle Bin are no longer needed. Once you initiate the deletion process, it can’t be undone.

We hope that you found this guide useful, and if you did, please pass the information along to those who might benefit from it as well.

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