Having little storage space on your computer is a hassle, here are some simple tricks to recover memory on our device
Little storage space on your computer can be a big problem. With memory at its limit, we don’t have the ability to install new programs or download vacation photos. Fortunately, there are several actions that we can take to recover space from the PC’s hard drive.
The first step to take to recover some memory is to delete any item, file or application that we no longer use. For photos, for example, we can think about buying an external hard drive. This is a fairly inexpensive and also convenient solution. In this way, if we are big fans of photography, we won’t occupy our computer’s memory too quickly. Then pay attention to the Download folder, this is usually where we accumulate a lot of useless files. If we find any, we can right-click on them and then choose Delete. If we use synchronization services like DropBox and Google Drive, we can save the heaviest files to the cloud.
Windows and MacOS Tools
Both on Windows and Mac computers we have several tools to free up memory space. These are programs installed by default on the PC. Using apps like Daisy Disk or Disk Inventory X for macOS and WinDirStat for Windows we can get a complete report of the documents that are taking up the most space inside our hard drive. To activate the internal memory analysis on Windows just click on the Start button (the one with the Windows icon at the bottom left of the screen) then on Windows System and finally on This PC. In the new window that will open, there will be an overview of the hard drives present in the computer and the space occupied by files.
To clean up unnecessary files we can use another tool instead. Look for Disk Cleanup on the Windows search bar and then select your computer as the drive. At this point, in the list of documents that you have on your PC, select the files that you want to delete. Once this is done just click on OK and you’re done. If we have a Mac instead we have to go to the Apple menu, then look for Storage and here select the Manage option. At this point we’ll be able to reorder the files on the computer by date or size, so we can choose which ones to delete. On Mac there’s also the Optimize feature that does the dirty work for us. The app collects all the old files, duplicate files and some documents we haven’t opened in a while, then creates a thumbnail and asks us what it can delete. After having a look we can delete everything or just some files of the selected ones.
Third-party tools
In addition to the pre-installed tools we can also download a third-party application. For duplicate files, for example, the best solution is Duplicate Files Finder (free for Windows) and DupeGuru (free for macOS). There are also programs such as CCleaner (free for Windows and Mac, but there is also a paid Pro version) that are designed to handle cleaning our hard drive all round. The software is useful for eliminating programs and files that we never use but also to improve the performance of our computer. Despite the many functions it has an intuitive interface and is easy to use.