Tuesday Tip: Clean Up Your Hard Drive in 5 Clicks

By Blaine Williams

Running out of disk space? Hard drives can get bogged down with unnecessary files and data that fill free space, causing the drive to reach capacity at a rapid rate. Luckily, Windows has a built-in cleanup tool that you might not know about. Windows Disk Cleanup utility will allow you to easily free up hard disk space in five simple clicks. 

To do this, navigate to your search bar located in the bottom lefthand corner of any Windows PC.

Figure 1 - Clean Up Your Hard Drive in 5 Clicks | Network 1 Consulting

After clicking in the search bar, type “disk cleanup,” and you will see a result queried that resembles a hard drive and a brush.

Figure 2 - Clean Up Your Hard Drive in 5 Clicks | Network 1 Consulting

After clicking the disk cleanup icon, you will be presented with a screen listing possible files to clean up. The two you should make note of are Temporary Internet Files and Downloaded Program Files.

Figure 3 - Clean Up Your Hard Drive in 5 Clicks | Network 1 Consulting

After clicking the “Clean up system files” button located at the bottom left of the disk cleanup window, you will receive a temporary loading pane, followed by a window identical to the one abovebut now you will notice an “OK” button populated at the bottom.

After clicking the “OK” button, you will be prompted to confirm your deletion.

Figure 4 - Clean Up Your Hard Drive in 5 Clicks | Network 1 Consulting

After clicking the “Delete Files” button, you have successfully cleaned up useless files that were consuming vital hard drive resources, as well as allocated additional space for new data to be written to your hard drive. 

Happy cleaning!

 

Blaine Williams: As Support Operations Manager at Network 1, Blaine uses his drive and passion to serve others and engage, empower, and develop the future leaders of Network 1. He started with the company in the role of Desktop Engineer and worked his way up to his current role by being dedicated to providing uncompromising client and peer service.

Network 1 designs, builds and supports the IT you need to run your business more securely, productively and successfully. Whether you want to outsource all of your IT needs to a reliable, responsive, service-oriented company, or need to supplement the work of your internal IT staff, we will carefully evaluate where you are now, discuss where you want to go and implement and support a plan to get you there with as little interruption as possible.

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