Windows 11 Users: Learn How to Free Up Space on Your C Drive

Filling up the C Drive or the main drive of Windows 11 is one of the annoying problems that if you don’t pay attention to it, you will face a slowdown. Some users suddenly notice that the Windows drive is complete. But what is the cause of this problem and how can it be solved?

C Drive is one of the most necessary partitions in any system as users choose it to install Windows. Various factors such as duplicate and temporary files, Windows updates, shadow files, and information related to Windows restore points are involved in the automatic filling of the Windows drive. This means; that if you are not careful, you may face various problems, including a decrease in interior space and eventually a drop in speed.

Many factors may affect the performance of your computer, one of the most important factors is the amount of space available on your computer drive.

If you cannot save new files or your Windows PC has problems, you can solve these problems by freeing up drive space.

C Drive is where Windows is installed, and our programs are installed in this drive.

The involvement of hard disk space is one of the problems many people face, which slows down the system’s performance.

You may be wondering what drive space is. The amount of data your computer can store in its system is called drive space.

When you use your computer, the data you enter into the system is saved in the drive space so that you can retrieve them again.

For example, when you save documents in Microsoft Word, your data is held in the space drive.

How drive space affects your PC’s speed?

To answer this question, I want to give a simple example so that you can better understand the issue. For example, imagine a basket in which you store items, and as you use the basket more, it holds more things, and you want to find some of the items in the basket. If your cart contains many items, it will be difficult and time-consuming to search, but if there are few items, it will be easier and less time-consuming to search.

Now here; your computer works like a basket, and the space of the basket can be compared with the disk space of your computer, and the more it is stored in your computer, the more difficult it is for the CPU to recover it, and for this reason, with time, users notice a decrease in the system be.

There is an obvious solution for this is that you free up space to reverse this, which you can do manually by searching for large items to delete, which is unfortunately very time-consuming and takes several years, but there are many solutions to free up drive space in Windows 11.

In this article, there are three ways to free up C Drive in Windows 11.

Stay with us until the end of the article.

1.How to use Windows 11’s Disk Cleanup tool

The easiest way to free up space on your computer is to use Windows 11’s cleanup tool.

In this section, there are steps to use Windows 11’s Disk Cleanup tool.

1.Using Windows’s search function, find and go to the Disk Cleanup app.

 Note that you must install this program in advance on your system.

2.Click the drive that you need to clean from the menu shown.

If you have not run this program before and it is the first time you run it, it is better to run it on the main disk or the C Drive.

3. Select “OK” and wait for Windows 11 to sift through your files to look for items that can be safely deleted.

After loading, Windows will show a list of different types of eligible items. After the loading is finished, a list will be displayed that Windows displays the items that you can delete. In fact, Disk Cleanup tool selects items that do not cause any problems by deleting them, so it is safe to delete them.

4. Click other item types that you wish to delete.

Note: that if you click the option of not selecting items or selecting items, all your disk space will be changed in this case.

5. Select “Ok” and wait for the cleanup tool to load.

Now you have automatically deleted some files, as a result, some space will be freed up.

6. If you wish to scan your system files for some deletable files, Select Clean up system files on the window shown in step 5. Then, follow steps 5 and 6 again.

2.How to Free Space with your storage settings

Except for the cleaning tool, you can also use various cleaning features in Windows 11 storage settings. Follow the steps below to free up your drive.

1. First, go to the Storage Settings using the search field .You can also use Windows’s Settings under System > Storage.

2. Once in the Storage Settings window, scroll down to the Storage management section and click “Cleanup recommendations.” You will be taken to the Cleaning recommendations page.

3. In this section, you should wait for Windows to scan additional files it will segregate these files under four sections:

1.Temporary files.

2. Large or unused files.

3. Files synced to the cloud.

4. Unused apps.

4. Open each part, then select the files you don’t need and want to delete. Be careful in selecting file groups such as the Recycle Bin and Downloads, because select them, Windows will delete them all.

There may be files inside these groups that you need and don’t want to delete

5.  Select “Clean up” for each section after you choose the files or file groups to be deleted.

3.Windows 11’s Storage Sense

Users have an option to enable Storage Sentence in the storage settings. This section automatically identifies and deletes unnecessary files so that they do not take up space.

Users can also take advantage of its customization feature and customize it to exclude downloads from scheduled cleanups and the recycle bin.

1. To activate Storage Sense, you must go to Storage Sense settings and click on the toggle button next to Storage Sense to activate it.

2. Go to the Storage Sense settings page, then click the Run Storage Sense now option to run the cleaning instructions manually.

But some solutions prevent C Drive from filling up here are some methods that will reduce the possibility of C Drive filling up is done.

One of the good features of Windows is the possibility of compression. It is possible to compress the information of all folders and drives systemically without zipping them. By doing this, the amount of data accumulated on the system will be decreased, and you can still access them as before.

1. How to Compress folder in Windows 11

1. From Computer, find the folder you want to compress.

2. Right click on it and select Properties.

3. Click Advanced at the bottom.

4. Check the Compress contents to save disk space option and then click OK.

5. Click Apply.

6. Check the Apply changes to this folder, subfolders and files option (this will compress all the information inside that folder).

7. Click OK.

8. Finally, click OK again to close the window.

The steps we explained above are related to the compression of folders; if desired, this feature can be used to reduce the size of files.

If you intend to disable this feature, repeat the above steps, and in the fourth step, be sure to uncheck the Compress contents to save disk space option.

2. How to compress drives in Windows 11

To compress Windows 11 NTFS for an entire drive, follow these steps:

1. Enter Computer.

2. Right-click on one of the drives you want to compress all of its data, and then click Properties.

3. In the window that opens, check the Compress this drive to save disk space option at the bottom of the screen.

4. Click Apply.

5. In the opened window, check the Apply changes to drive (drive letter), subfolders, and files option.

6. Click OK.

7. Click OK again.

As we said, this method slows down the system, specifically if you apply it to a Windows drive.

As before, if you want to disable this feature, just uncheck the Compress this drive to save disk space option in the third step and repeat the next steps.

3. Delete redundant user accounts

Another reason for filling up the C Drive of different Windows can be related to the existence of multiple user accounts on the same device. Although deleting these user accounts won’t work wonders, doing so can significantly increase free space.

In shared systems, each user or user account has a separate desktop, and its information is stored in a completely different folder on the Windows drive. Since users primarily store data on the desktop, deleting redundant user accounts in Windows can help free up the Windows drive. However, this is only in the case that the amount of information on that account is extensive.

In any case, to do this in Windows 11, enter the settings section and then follow the following steps in order:

1. Enter the Accounts section.

2. Click on Family & other users.

3. Select the desired account that you no longer intend to use.

4. Click on Remove

5. Click Delete account and data to delete this account.

Note: that to delete more user accounts, you need to repeat the above steps.

4. Disable Reserved Storage Windows 11

Reserved Storage is one of the exclusive features in Windows 11 that allocates several gigabytes of operating system memory to store system files, updates, and temporary files. These files are used when you plan to update or upgrade your operating system.

Although it is helpful to have such information on the system to reduce the problems caused by Windows updates, this information can take up some space on your system. However, it should be said that this information will only be deleted from the system until you update your Windows to a newer version.

In Windows 11, the procedure is as follows:

1. Enter the Command Prompt window.

2. To do this, search for CMD in the start menu and open it as Admin (by right-clicking and selecting the Run As Administrator option)

3. Enter the following command:

 DISM /Online /Set-ReservedStorageState /State:Disabled

5. Clear the browser cache

Another thing that gets less attention is the cache memory of different browsers. All browsers, including Chrome and Firefox, store the information of all sites in their cache memory so that the content is loaded faster the next time you use that site. Depending on how many websites you visit daily, the browser cache can be from several hundred megabytes to several gigabytes.

To clear Chrome’s cache, you should just:

1.Go to Settings, Advanced, Privacy and security

2. Click on Clear browsing data.

3. To clear the Firefox cache, after entering the settings section, you need to enter Privacy & Security and under the History section, select Clear your recent history.

4. In the Edge browser, after entering the settings, enter the Clear browsing data section and then select the two options Cookies and Cached data from the Choose what to clear section.

Conclusion

The sudden and unexplained filling up of Windows C Drive in laptops and computers is one of the problems that users face. In most cases, this happens due to mistakes and even the lack of knowledge of the users of the Windows operating system, but sometimes, things like system files, Windows internal functions, updates, etc can be problematic.

What other ways do you know to free C Drive in Windows 11?