Once you have used most of the space on your hard disk, it will cause the whole computer to slow down and become really a pain to download large programs /files from the internet. And it becomes very important for you to free hard disk space and speed up your computer again.

1. Run A Disk Cleanup.

We all know that when running the computer, there will be lots of junk file generating such as BAK、OLD、TMP, TEMP, CACHE files and so on, which will only take up lots of hard disk space and slow down the data access speed. So this will be the first thing you should do to clean up the useless files to free up more available space.

You can go to My Computer -> right click the disk which you want to clean up. Click Properties -> General -> Disk cleanup -> select the file types to be deleted within the appearing Disk Cleanup wizard -> Press OK and then Yes to automatically remove the junk files from your computer.

2. Adjust Recycle Bin Capacity to Get More Space

Normally, the capacity of the Recycle Bin is set according to the hard disk space, for example, for a drive which has 500GB capacity, the default space allocated to the Recycle Bin would be 50GB (10%). That is a big waste of disk space. You can adjust the space allocated for Recycle Bin to regain more available space. Follow the steps below:

Right-click the Recycle Bin and choose Properties, if you want to only have one drive, or want to have the same setting for all multiple drives, first please check the tab "Use one setting for all drives" and then just slide the slider to the left until you get the percentage you think is appropriate; If you want a different percentage of space reserved for each drive, first click the Configure Drives Independently button, then click each drive’s tab at the top and the proportion to be less than 5%. Click OK to save your settings.

3. Defragment Hard Disks Regularly.

Disk fragments will occur when involving to the allocation of files on the computer, making the disk fragmented. Fragments not only take up a lot of space but also restrict hard disk from high data access speed and therefore high computer performance. The more fragments in the computer, the slower it will be when running. So to make the computer always run at top speed, a disk defragmentation is needed.