What to do if your PC doesn't have enough space for Windows 10 [Solved]

Windows 10 is a worthy upgrade, but your system will need space to support it. Here's how to clear some room.

You’ve read the reviews and made the decision: You want Windows 10 on your PC. The brand new operating system brings with it a host of improvements, including a new web browser,Microsoft Edge, the return of the Start Menu, better built-in apps and the chatty Cortana. The only question is: Is your computer ready to handle Windows 10?

It’s a good bet your Windows 7 SP1, 8 or 8.1 machine (all of which qualify for free upgrades) has the right minimum screen resolution (800 x 600), at least a 1GHz processor and more than 1GB RAM. However, when it comes to storage space, especially on the older Windows 7 machines, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Windows 10, according to Microsoft’s Windows 10 specifications page, requires at least 16GB of free storage for the 32-bit OS and 20GB for the 64-bit edition. For those with one- or even half-terabyte drives, that may not sound like a lot of space, but if you’ve owned your PC for a while, you may find that your storage space, especially on the C:Drive where you’ll probably install Windows 10 is in “the Red Zone.”

The “Red Zone” is when you right-click on your “C:Drive” icon in File Explorer and find that the green bar showing the amount of used space on the drive has turned red, to indicate the drive is almost full. If you’re lucky, you have another drive or partition with the requisite space to handle the Windows 10 download (9GB) and installation.

If not, you’ve got some cleaning up to do.

OneDrive and others:

Microsoft’s excellent cloud-based file storage service, OneDrive, can help, but it is not a panacea for all your storage space woes. Initially, OneDrives acts as a file backup system, always keeping duplicate and up-to-date versions of your files available locally. This is important if you plan on working on your files when out of Internet range (think a long flight without Wi-Fi).

Choose which folders to sync on your PC and save a lot of space

You can, however, choose which files and folders you want synced on your system (you right click on the folders to set and remove offline access or gain access to the Sync management tool). This can help clear up some space — sometimes a lot of it. Just remember, then, that those folders and files will only be available when you’re online.

The reality is, though, you’ll have to do some house-cleaning to make way for the new OS, which is almost certain to improve your Windows experience. Which means you have to go through the somewhat arduous task of finding the large files eating up your hard drive alive and then deleting or moving them to an external drive. (Side note: invest in a portable terabyte drive right now. They cost $59.)

You have a couple of options for identifying large files on your system. One is the old-school way. You open the File Explorer, make sure it’s set to look at the C:Drive root (so not a subfolder) and then search “*.*” in the search box near the upper right corner of the File Explorer window. It can take a while to complete that search since it’s looking for every file on the C:Drive. Once you have a list, click on the “Size” column header to sort by size. The largest file will either be at the top or bottom, depending on the default size sort order.

This free utility can quickly tell you which files are taking the most space on your hard drive.

The other way to find these files is to use a free utility like WizTree. It’s easy to install works on most NTFS drives and will give you a result in seconds. It can give you a straight list or a folder view, to see where the big files live and which folders are the chief space hogs.

Delete with care:

One thing you’ll notice is that you can’t simply delete all the really big files. Some of them relate to the system, like “page.sys;” others are apps. If you back up your iPhone to iTunes, you’ll notice some pretty fat iOS apps stored on your system. Only delete them if you don’t think you’ll ever need that backup edition.

You will also notice, however, that there are a lot video files. Every movie and TV show you’ve downloaded and many of your own home videos are easily some of the biggest space hogs. An hour of video might take a gigabyte of space. Try moving those videos off to a backup drive. Do the same, if possible, with your photos (multi-megapixel cameras are making bigger and bigger photo files). Music can eat up a lot of space, too, but if you delete the music, you could be losing iTunes backup files.

Another area to look at is the Downloads Folder. It may be one of the biggies in your file-size scans. Most of that stuff you probably don’t need, like original installation files, email downloads (unless you forgot to move the important ones to their own folder).

You can also free up space by emptying the system Recycle bin, which is that trash-can icon in the upper-left corner of your screen, and by emptying browser caches. Internet Explorer and Chrome have a lot of web history stored in them. Cleaning them out will speed them up and save space.

Clean up:

Windows Disk Cleanup tool can walk you through some of the space management tasks.

Windows also has its own tool for helping you manage storage space. It’s a little utility called “Disk Cleanup” that will remove unnecessary system files to help free up space. It will handle some of the cleanup mentioned above, with the added benefit of attacking the system’s “Temporary Files.” That one is usually a few gigabytes on its own. It can also kill system restore points and unused programs (through the Add/Remove programs utility), if you’re confident you won’t need any of that again.

It’s a tedious and sometimes scary process, but when everything is done, you’re system will be ready, space-wise, for a new tenant: Windows 10.

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