The Ultimate Guide To Freeing Up Space On Your PC or Mac Computer (Part 1)

I own an IT business and one common problem we deal with is our clients running out hard drive space on their computers. This can result in not being able to save work, slowing the computer down, or ultimately preventing the computer from working at all.

In this series I would like to show some different ways to free up space on your hard drive. So whether you are out of hard drive space completely or just want to perform some general housekeeping on your computer, this series is for you.

In the first part of this series I will cover a free program that was built for this very problem. We use it almost daily and usually have good results with it. It doesn’t always free up as much space as we need but this is our first line of offense. And if you walk away from this series with just using this utility for general housekeeping on your computer, then I will feel like I’ve helped you greatly.

Make note, when using space cleaning programs in general you have to be very careful. There are lots out there that are complete frauds and scams. They either want you to pay for their product after you install them or they will infect your machine with malware.

The standard version of this utility that I’m going to cover is completely free and is the only one I recommend using at this time. So without further ado, here we go.

 

PC Instructions:

Step 1: Download the PC version of CCleaner Free from here. https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/download?pc

Step 2: Once the download competes, run the installer. If there is a checkbox next to “Try Google Chrome” in the bottom left corner, uncheck that (unless you want to try Google Chrome).

Step 3: Click the big “Install” button in the middle of the window.

Step 4: Once the installation has finished, uncheck “View release notes” and click the “run CCleaner” button.

Step 5: The default items that are selected are good enough to help free up a lot of space. If you are in desperate need of more free space, you can select more items than the defaults. Click “Run Cleaner” when you are ready. A dialog box will pop up warning you that you will be deleting files from your computer. Click “Continue”.

Step 6: Once it has finished, you can click the “Show Advanced Report” link to see what it cleaned and how much space it has freed up.

You can now close CCleaner because you are finished.

 

Mac Instructions:

Step 1: Download the Mac version of CCleaner Free from here. https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/download?mac

Step 2: Once the download completes, open the DMG file and drag CCleaner into the Applications folder.

Step 3: Go into the Applications folder and run CCleaner.

Step 4: The default items that are selected are good enough to help free up a lot of space. If you are in desperate need of more free space, you can select more items than the defaults. Click “Run Cleaner” when you are ready. A dialog box will pop up warning you that you will be deleting files from your computer. Click “Yes”.

Step 5: Once it has finished, you will see a report of what it cleaned and how much space it has freed up.

You can now close CCleaner because you are finished.

 

I tell our clients a general rule of thumb is to keep at least 20GB of hard drive space free. That gives your computer enough room for the pagefile or swapfile to grow and shrink along with things like your browser cache.

If you found this tutorial helpful, please let me know in the comments.

Please stay tuned for part 2 of this series were we take a more in-depth look at how we can free up more space on your computer.