Storage Sense is a utility built into Windows 10 and Windows 11 that automates some of our previous recommendations to free up disk space. RELATED: Make System Restore Use Less Drive Space in Windows 7 Enable Storage Sense If these features are less important to you than the hard disk space they use, go ahead and free a few gigabytes by reducing the amount of space System Restore uses. The trade-off is you’ll have fewer restore points to restore your system from and fewer previous copies of files to restore. If System Restore is eating up a lot of hard drive space for restore points, you can reduce the amount of hard disk space allocated to System Restore. RELATED: How to Find and Remove Duplicate Files on Windows Reduce the Amount of Space Used for System Restore It allows you to specify folders, types of files, and more.

Or if you don’t mind spending a few bucks, you can use Duplicate Cleaner Pro, which not only has a nicer interface, but has tons of extra features to help you find and delete duplicate files. You can use a duplicate-file-finder application to scan your hard drive for duplicate files, which are unnecessary and can be deleted. Additionally, we recommend you stay away from the registry cleaner in CCleaner and other similar applications. Don’t tick that option unless you’re absolutely sure. Warning: You can easily clear all of your saved passwords with CCleaner. However, if you don’t want to handle all of that manually, you can use CCleaner. CCleaner cleans junk files from a variety of third-party programs and also cleans up Windows files that Disk Cleanup won’t touch.

RELATED: Here's What You Should Use Instead of CCleaner The same goes for just about any other program - if you can use the program itself to clean up temporary files, do so. Typically, you should clear the temporary files created by your browser from within the browser itself. (Your browser cache uses hard disk space to save you time when accessing websites in the future, but this is little comfort if you need the hard disk space now.) For example, it won’t clear Firefox or Chrome browser caches, which can use gigabytes of hard disk space. The built-in Windows Disk Cleanup tool is useful, but it doesn’t delete temporary files used by other programs. RELATED: Analyze and Manage Hard Drive Space with WinDirStat Clean Temporary Files The visual representation might also help spot unexpected or forgotten large files.

Disk space cleaner