Windows 10 tip: Reclaim precious disk space with these storage tools

[RV_]

Is your Windows 10 laptop or tablet running low on free space? Built-in storage management tools let you pinpoint exactly which files and apps are to blame. In many cases, you can recover that free space with just a click or two.

 

Well here's Ed Bott one of the best tech writers on ZDNET for average users with no patience for the engineering parts.

 

Excerpt:

 

"Sometimes it seems like modern computing is a constant battle to maintain enough free disk space for the data you need to stay productive.

 

Your adversaries are apps that chew up disk space when you install them and then continue gobbling up disk space with the data files they create. And then there's Windows itself, which uses disk space for its system files, for hibernation and paging files, and for System Restore points.

 

To find out exactly where your storage space has gone, open the Windows 10 Settings app, click System, and then click Storage. (You can skip all that clicking by typing storage in the search box and then clicking the top item on the results list.)

 

The overall view displays the capacity and used space for all available fixed drives. Click the entry for your system drive to see a bar chart that breaks down how it's being used, with a color-coded list of categories beneath it.

 

Keep drilling and you'll find some extremely useful tools:"

 

The article goes on to show you what tools and what they will tell you, in the full article here: http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-tip-reclaim-precious-disk-space-with-these-storage-tools/?tag=nl.e539&s_cid=e539&ttag=e539&ftag=TRE17cfd61

[Biker56]

On my 1.80TB Desktop hard drive I have use a total of 70.0GB.

Have a lot of space to use yet.

[Pieere]

Good tip! I have used 51.8 gb and have 465 gb available!

[RV_]

Mine is getting full too! I have a 32GB SSD and a 2 TB HD on my AIO desktop, both factory and only 1TB left! But I have about 20 TBs in reserve on drives I use in my external drive docks, four of which are clones in case. Data is separate, and images saved too. Despite having too many systems right now because the oil prices have caused a lot of layoffs here and in surrounding oil states, no one is buying luxury items or used computers right now out of Craigslist, we used to keep two desktops and two tablets and my last desktop system as my back up system. Now we just keep two desktops, both 2014 touch All in Ones, and two full windows tablets, one of which is a Surface Pro 3 i5/128GB/4GB with a Surface Pro 4 typecover I just bought on sale so it acts as my backup desktop with my dock setup, a USB 3.0 powered four port hub, connected to the external drive dock, and the external full size KB/Mouse USB receiver.

 

Seriously guys? I also have two Windows tablets that I bought with 64GB on the Venue Pro, and on my new Surface Pro 3 128GB of storage not counting the Micro SDXC card I always use for music on the go. But for folks that just bought the new really reduced capacity and price full Windows tablets to use as tablets and are not loading Office and other productivity programs as we did, and bought 32GB SSD tablets with only 2 GB RAM or worse the tiny cheaper tablets with 16GB storage/1GB RAM, and Windows 10 reduced version, they might come in handy.

 

Today the trend is to mobile computing with Windows and Continuum will make that possible with the tiny drives and versions on Windows 10 mobile and full Windows mobile devices running with minimums and Atom quad cores. Wireless portable storage is coming down along with SSD prices.