How to Clean C Drive In Windows 10

 

Today We are going to talk about How to clean the C Drive or also known as Local Disk C in Windows 10 or 11. (Some interfaces may be different in Windows 11 than Windows 10 but almost the same). There are several steps and procedures to carry on and it's very simple and very effective. Today we are not going to use any third-party programs to perform this cleaning process, so you don’t have to download tools to do so. 

You may have experienced that sometimes your C drive is marked by red line by showing that it is full, so cleaning your C drive will make your Windows run much faster.

Step Number One - Cleaning

Press Windows Key + R to open the “RUN” Program. Now enter temp and click on ok.

Run Window with " Temp"

It will open the temp folder, in case if it is asking for any permission, please click continue. Now you will see all the files and folders in the Temp Folder, which are all not needed.

Temp Folder of Windows

Those files are only created for temporary purposes by the Windows. Now you can select all the files of the folder and press Shift + Delete on your keyboard. Few files may be undeletable so ignore them and delete the rest.

Now you have to open the “RUN” box again and this time type in %temp% and click on ok and another folder will appear.

Run Window with "%Temp%

As same as we dealt with last folder continue deleting all files in it by pressing Shift + Delete. Once you do that you have to open the “RUN” again for the one last time, and this time type in prefetch and click on ok.

Run Window with "prefetch"

and you will see another folder opens and may ask you for the permission to access the folder, in that case just click on continue. So, in this folder Shift + Delete all the files like before.

Step Number Two - Recycle Bin

I know you people may know about this but have to mention this also because majority of people are unaware about this. Whenever you delete a file by right click delete option or hitting the delete key on keyboard, it will not remove the files from the computer, but it will keep all the deleted files on recycle bin until a certain limit. (The default limit of Windows 10 recycle bin hold around 50 GB).

If you forget to delete a file by pressing Shift + Delete the deleted file will be moved to the recycle bin. So, the recycle bin is using your C Drive’s space. So, if you do not cleanup recycle bin frequently, it will acquire a good amount of space out of your C Drive. So, delete the files in the recycle bin to gain more space on your C Drive. We can do few more things gain more space on your Local Disk C.           

Step Number Three - Uninstall

In this step I am going to show you how to gain space in C Drive by uninstalling all the unwanted or hardly ever use programs or software. Which are basically installed into your C Drive by default. So, by removing those unwanted programs, you can get a lot more space on your C Drive. For that you need to go to the Start Menu and search Add or Remove Programs and click that setting to land into the desired area. Or you can go the Control Panel and find and click on the Programs and features option. Then uninstall each and rarely using or unwanted programs one by one.

Uninstall Window of Contral Panel

Step Number Four - Optimize the C drive

In this step you need to go to your This PC or File Explorer. Now go to the C Drive right click and choose properties from here go to the tools tab and click on the optimize option under the optimize and defragment drive section.

Disk Properties Tools Tab

Now you will see this window, so make sure you have selected C Drive from here. Once you do that come down and click on the optimize button once again. There we go.    

Optimize Window

Step Number Five - Disk Cleanup

Final step of all. To do this go to your Start Menu and search Disk Cleanup. Click on the icon and it will perform a quick scan over your drive and show you this window.

Disk Cleanup Window

Once you are here, check each and every option and click on cleanup system files. It will perform a deep scan once it finished it will open new window as same as we dealt with the previous window, just select each and every option here as well. Then click on ok and delete files. The cleanup process will take a while so let it finish! There we go that are the step that we can do to cleanup your C Drive hope you all see some performance gain and space gain on your system.