Hard drive space, damn storage that when you want to realize it you already have very little left and you have to see them to organize everything to be able to install that acquired program or the new Steam game that takes up more than it should. Although today the size of hard drives has increased considerably compared to the old ones, but there is a handicap, SDD hard drives, that due to their high performance and their price not so high, we usually have the problem that a Hard disk of only 250GB cost us about 130 euros or more, with the consequent little space that we can have in our computer if we leave this incredible SSD for programs / games and operating system.
By having this little storage space it is advisable to have certain points very clear in case at some point we run out of space, since not everyone can afford to acquire a 500GB SDD hard drive or two of 250GB reaching more than 250 euros. Here are some tips to increase hard drive space in both Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.
Disk Cleanup
This Windows tool lets you free up disk space to keep it clean of all kinds of unnecessary files such as the internet cache or the same recycle bin that one sometimes forgets to delete the files that are in it.
- To open this tool from «Computer», we select one of the hard drives and do right click mouse choosing "Properties"
- Among the different tabs that we will see in this new window, we search «General». In it, next to the pie of the distributed space, we select «Free up space»
- A window will start indicating that it is scanning the drive to determine how much space can be released
- At the end of this process You can see an image like the one you find below:
- You can select as many as you want. Important temporary internet files, temporary files or thumbnails, which are the ones that usually have more memory used. Select and click on "Clean system files"
Disable hibernate mode
Before knowing what will be achieved when this option is deactivated, it must be taken into account that hibernation is responsible for saving the current state of the system before turning off our PC, to "turn it back on" as it was with the different programs that we have open and it is an interesting option to save energy. If you have a desktop computer you can deactivate it to save a few gigabytes that it uses to store the system configuration. If you had a laptop, you would already have to decide whether to leave it activated with the consequent battery saving.
- You have to go to Power Options in the Control Panel. Then you must choose "Behavior of the on / off buttons"
- To later choose "Change settings currently unavailable", to go down to the shutdown configuration and deactivate the hibernate option. Save changes and restart the computer
More apps
As it usually happens in our daily lives we usually have more than we need, and so it happens on our computer. If we do not have enough storage we can see which programs or games take up more memory to think about uninstalling them.
- From "programs" and features in the Control Panel you can access the list of installed programs to uninstall the ones you want. Click on one and uninstall it
CCleaner
CCleaner could carry the same whole article, since we are before the most important tool that you are surely going to install on your computer. We can delete both temporary internet files, Windows temporary files, registry files and other types of applications.
In case it comes configured to eliminate what is necessary. CCleaner is like the mechanic of our car that from time to time we should go to his workshop to take a look. Here it is advisable that every month you visit CCleaner to have your computer ready.
Other options
External hard drives that you can get today one of 1 terabyte over 50 euros, are another option, to carry all the data such as movies, TV series, music or all kinds of files such as images.
Another option is the popular online storage like Dropbox or Google Drive that allows us to take a huge amount of data to the cloud with the breathing space that we can give to our hard disk of a lifetime or those new ones with little storage but that have superior performance such as SSDs.