How to Clean and Save Space on Windows 11

How Tos • Apr 28, 2022

Memory and space management is essential for any device. Be it your mobile phone or your desktop, or any other. A good space management strategy leaves you with some extra space in your device, which can be used to store some more data.

What makes the storage gets used up? Some part of the storage is used to store the operating software such as Windows and MacOS in PCs and Android and iOS in mobile phones. This space used by the device is necessary for its proper functioning.

But, the space other than this is used up by different multimedia, games, apps, and many more. Some of these stay in the device unnecessarily and use up the storage. It leads to the slowing down of the device, which none of the users will want.

With time and updates, many new features are added to the new Windows versions. These new features or, say, versions take more space than the previous ones, and so the space management, i.e., the cleaning and saving of space, becomes important on the latest Windows 11.

In the upcoming parts of the article, we will discuss how you can clean the unnecessarily used space and save it for important work on your system with Windows 11. Scroll down to find out!!

Note: It’s time for a little spring cleaning your Mac too, check our tips for the digital ways to clean your Mac.

First things first: check space distribution on your Windows 11

To clear and save the space, first, you need to find out what are the things that are using up the space in your system.

Windows 11 comes with the tools that help you in knowing how the space in your system is being used up. You can find most of these tools in the storage menu.

To access these tools. You can simply follow these steps: Click to the “Start” button > Settings > System settings > Storage

When you reach there, you can easily see the space distribution in your system.

At the top of the window, you can see how much space has been used up out of the total space available in your system.

Below it, you can see the category-wise distribution, that is, which things are taking up how much space. You can also tap the arrow ( > ) at the right-most corner of the category if you want to find out further details about the respective category.

You can only see some categories in the window that is visible to you. For further and detailed information about the other categories in which the data is stored, you can tap on the “Show more categories” option present just below the space distribution.

On tapping the “Show more categories” option, you get directed to a new window where a detailed distribution of each type of category is present. All the categories like the media, apps and features, reserved storage, and more, along with their respective shares in the storage, are displayed.

You can further click on the respective categories to know more about storage usage.

Now that you know how you can find out the storage usage in your system. It’s time that you should know about how you can get rid of the unwanted storage usage and can clean up and save the storage usage.

Ways to clean up and save the storage in your Windows 11

1. Clean up the storage in Settings

You can clean up the excess storage in the Settings only. There are various ways in which you can clean up unnecessary storage.

If you want to clean up some of the storage quickly, you can go to the “Temporary Files”, which is visible upfront. If not, you can click on the “Show more categories” and can find the option there.

Tap on the option, and a new window opens up where you can find various types of temporary files which can be cleaned up. You can select which type of files you want to delete from the available files by clicking on the check box present for every file.

After you have selected the desired files, you can see how much storage you are cleaning up. Now to delete the files, you just need to click on the “Remove Files” button, and all the selected files will be deleted.

Another method by which you can clean the storage is from the “Storage management” option, which is present just below the storage distribution.

In this section, there are two options through which you can clean up the storage. The first one is the “Storage Sense” and the other one is “Cleanup recommendations”.

The storage sense option automatically detects the temporary and unnecessary files present in the system and cleans them from time to time automatically. To use this feature, all you need is to switch the toggle on-off button visible there.

You can also change the time period of the automatic deletion of the files by clicking on the arrow ( > ) visible just to the right of the toggle on-off button.

Another method by which you can clean up the storage is through the “Cleanup recommendations” option, recommended by the system itself.

After clicking on the “Cleanup recommendations” option, a new window opens where you can see various options like temporary files, large or unused files, and more. You can click on any of the options and see the files available for clean-up.

You just need to select the desired files and click on the “Clean-up” button. All the selected files will be deleted from the system, and the space will be freed.

2. Clean up space using Disk Clean-up

This feature was added to the Windows operating system in Windows 10 and is still present in the latest Windows 11. It helps clean the storage by deleting the temporary and permanent files, if you want, from the storage.

To clean up the space using this feature, you can follow the following steps:

  1. Go to the search box on the taskbar, or go to the Start button and search “Disk Cleanup”.
  2. Select the drive from which you want to delete the files and click the OK button.
  3. Select the type of file which you want to delete in the “Files to delete” option. To get a description of the file type, select the desired file.
  4. If you want to free up more space, you can also delete the system files using the disk cleanup. For this, you need to select the “Clean up system files”, then select the file type to delete. You can also see the description of the file type by selecting the file type
  5. Click the OK button.

3. Storing the files at another place

You can also save the space on your system by storing the large and important files on external hard drives, flash drives, etc.

Also, you can store the files on cloud storage such as OneDrive by Microsoft or Google Drive, or any other. The advantage of these cloud storage drives is that you just need to remember the email id and its password.

You can access the files from anywhere in the world. All you need is an internet connection in your system.

4. Cleaning your browser data

Along with the cleaning up of storage using different methods, you also need to take a look at the storage used by the browser. The browsers installed on your system also occupy a lot of storage space.

The cookies and browser history only take up a little bit of space, but a large part of the storage is occupied by the cached data. The cache data can become a number of gigabytes large if not cleared regularly.

The cached data includes the information from the different sites that you visit regularly. This data helps in the easy and fast opening of those sites even when your internet speed is not that fast.

Hence, the cached data somewhat saves time. But, if you are here, it means that you have a PC with the latest Windows 11. Hence, your PC must be faster so you will not face any such problems while opening any site.

5. Using third party applications

Many third-party applications are also available for cleaning up the space in the latest Windows 11. These third-party PC cleaner applications do nothing different than the normal work done by the tools present in Windows 11.

The only difference is that the process while using the tools of Windows 11 is much more complicated as compared to that of these third-party apps. These third-party apps like CCleaner bring down large complex processes in one place, and hence it becomes simpler to free up the storage.

But, there can be some disadvantages to these third-party apps too. Sometimes they may delete some of the important data from the system if not checked carefully while deleting the data.

Also, these third-party apps themselves take up a lot of space in the storage. And some of optimization apps also claim that they boost the system’s performance, but they do not do so.

In turn, after occupying the space, they may affect the performance of the system and downgrade it than the normal performance.

Some of these apps also tell you to clear the “Registry key”, which will boost the performance of the system, but it is not advisable. All the system operations and processes are carried out directly or indirectly by using the registry keys only.

Hence, cleaning up of registry keys can lead to a dis-functioning of some of the specific programs and, in worst cases, can even lead to the breakdown of the operating system.

Conclusion

From the above article, it is clear that storage management is very important as it helps increase the performance of the system and makes the system faster.

To clear the storage and save space on your system, you can try the different methods that are mentioned above. All these methods will surely help you in managing the space in your computer.

Also, one more thing to mention here is that try to avoid using many third-party apps if possible. And, if you are using some, be aware and check carefully so that your important information does not get leaked.

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