How to recover lost memory space on your computer

All this lost space can leave you using up a lot of memory for no reason at all. And you may think that your f... Read More

Storage space is vital for many users -- especially if it's on a smartphone or PC. Installing applications and games, saving songs and movies to any hard disk is quick. So quick, that the system often misses certain sectors of memory. These sectors do occupy an amount of space.

All this lost space can leave you using up a lot of memory for no reason at all. And you may think that your files actually take up all that space.

There are two ways in which we can recover and utilise these wasted sectors. Cleaning your disk of 'junk' files, and reassigning all the memory to proper sectors on your hard disk.

Let's cover the faster method first. Cleaning the 'junk' files can not only recover some amount of space, but it also speeds up the computer. These 'junk' files include installation files, Windows Update files and temporary cache memory from browsers and system processes.

Step 1:

Place the cursor on the Cortana search bar and type 'Disk Cleanup'. This is the Windows equivalent of an Android cache cleaning app. You can delete the files that are temporarily stored on the computer, especially those that take up more memory.

Step 2:

From the drop-down menu, you can select the drives that you want to target. We suggest you start with your primary hard disk partition. Click on 'Clean up system files'

Step 3:

Once selected, you can view the amount of space you can free up and which folders take up more memory.

Step 4:

Ensure that you select all the folders and hit 'Ok'. All the temporarily saved files will be cleared from your computer.

You can repeat the same steps for all other partitions.

Defragmentation is the second method, and unlike the Disk Cleaner, it does not delete unnecessary files. It rearranges all the files to occupy the unused space.

Consider a bookshelf where several books are placed one, but with occasional gaps. So, to make things more organised, you shift the books into the gaps and make more space for new books. Disk defragmentation works in the same way, so with the large amounts of data that's is being reorganised, it will take up a larger amount of time.

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