Low Disk Space. It can affect all of us.
What can we do about it?
Let's talk to Wes at the bench.
Hey, Wes. Good to see you again.
So low disk space.
This can be something that affects many people.
And if it does, what are some of the symptoms?
Well, one of the first things
that you're going to notice are performance issues.
Performance issues are one of the things
that we kind of just through our normal interaction
with the computer we noticed before anything else.
Is this like when it takes longer for something to load up?
You got it.
Like, Igo in there, and I want to open up
one of those myriad of social networks,
and it just takes forever,
or I'm trying to download a program or a file
and it just seems to take forever.
That's what we're talking about, right?
Yeah. It very well could be.
You're talking about things like web browsers,
which is certainly an application really
that could be slow internet too.
But if you think about, like launching up an application
within your operating system,
maybe you're launching something like…
not necessarily anything resource-intensive.
I was going to say Photoshop,
but that's going to need a lot of resources to begin with,
because it's pretty intensive application.
But it could be something as simple as a game.
Maybe a game that you've been playing for a while
and you load it up,
and you notice that it takes a little bit time
from the time you click an icon on your desktop
to the time that you actually see it on the screen.
If you're dragging windows around
and you're trying to rearrange your windows,
- you might notice like your cursor kind of stops and shutters. - Or skipping maybe.
And skips, yeah.
So pretty much things like that.
Performance issues are one of the things
that we as end users
or end users in general are going to notice
because while we're working with our computer every day—
and one of the things that we noticed is the fact that,
hey, something's changed.
I don't know what it is.
But it's just not working as good as it used to.
Yeah, like I tried to load a file from Word.
I mean that that's very simple.
And it just seemed to take forever.
Yeah, well, we need to keep in mind too,
that if you are downloading something off the internet,
that could really just be internet speed.
But if you're talking about,
if we let's say unplug the network cable
and anything that's happening locally on the machine,
if we're still getting slow transfers,
or if you're trying to copy a file,
let's say for an external drive
on to your main computer there,
and you get so far,
and maybe it tells you there's not enough space on the drive.
So errors are another thing that can occur.
And errors can happen a lot.
Right.
So an error could be like, when you do get that…
I call it freeze page.
That's because I'm from Iowa.
So anyway, but it says error,
you have an error, you try again, or retry.
We're talking like, that's what we're talking about?
Yeah, sometimes.
And I tell you what, and I'm going to raise my hand,
I'm just as guilty as this.
Sometimes we’ll see an error
and we just click okay and we just ignore it.
And then you don't really know exactly what is going on.
So one of the things that's really good is to…
if you do happen to click through those errors,
or it flashes up there, and it goes away.
There is a nice little program here in windows
that you can gain some insight to those errors.
If you happen to do like I do, you go jump to click it,
you're not paying attention, you click Okay.
And now, again, leads back into those performance issues.
Let me show you here in the operating system
what I'm talking about.
Windows has got this cool little component
if I just right click on our Start button here
and we launch up Event Viewer.
Oh, sure.
So Event Viewer is a really good place that we can take this
and we can look through things like our event logs
and logs that are related to our system.
And it takes a second here.
In fact, that right there
is a telltale sign of performance issues.
Do you see how it's taking and I'm getting a not responding here?
That Not Responding here is letting me know
up something's not quite working right here.
And yeah, so you can see that we're already seeing signs of that.
Right. And we might even see that there are even more errors
that we weren't even aware of here.
So what causes all this, Wes?
Well, it can be just basic neglect to your files in general.
And what I mean by that is not that so much that we're,
“Oh, I haven't paid attention to my files,”
but more so that maybe you're accumulating a lot of files.
I mean, let's face it, Zach, we live in a day and age
where you deal with a lot of high-definition video.
Like for instance, any of our directors here at ITProTV
that are behind the camera can tell you
how much it can be a pain to deal
with a file that's 40 gigabytes in size.
Well, that one file gets…
Let's say we do a little bit of editing.
Let's do a little real-world scenario here.
We do a little bit of editing to one of our shows.
And I'm not sure exactly how big the files are.
I'm just taking a guess, 10 gigs in size.
And then I go to Titus, the director for this show, and I say,
“Hey, you know what,
I think we're going to throw that video out,
and we're going to reshoot it, you know,
maybe I was having bad hair day,
or I just couldn't speak point English.”
And let's say he’s,
“Okay, well, I'm going to mark that for deletion.”
But then we never come back to it, right?
So we started cumulating excess files,
and maybe we forget about the fact that they're there.
We don't delete them.
We just leave them in there.
Yeah. Let me show you here on my computer,
what I'm talking about.
I've got an example here of some files that I do.
And again, I'm just as guilty.
This really isn't the blame game.
But if I open up File Explorer here,
and I go into my Documents folder,
you're going to notice right here,
notice that these are a couple of ISO files.
Now, don't worry so much,
that's just something that we can apply
on operating system to our hard drive.
But notice the size of them.
This is 4.6 gigs, this is 5.1 gigs,
- just in a single file here. - Those are very large.
So it shows you that, I forgot about these,
I put them on the computer and guess what?
I left them there.
And the problem with that is we leave those files there,
they start to accumulate, and that becomes a problem.
So just a lot of files that maybe you could delete,
you could free some space up.
That can cause it.
Other things are like unused programs.
I don't know if you're like me,
but here's a situation on our mobile devices.
I don't know if you're like me where you,
“Oh, this little productivity app looks great.”
I don't know what it is.
You download it, use it for a second, you're like,
it really wasn't that good, but here's another one.
And here's another one, and here's another one
- and then I don't go back on it. - But you’re leaving them.
And you leave them.
Well, the same thing can happen here on your machine.
You download a program,
for whatever reason, you don't use it,
and then you never double back on it to maybe uninstall it.
Other things too that happen a lot.
Your operating system keeps temporary files,
applications keep temporary files,
Windows keeps temporary files such as a Windows Update.
And for the most part, it should flush those files out,
but sometimes it doesn't.
Your applications,
when they have these temporary files on a reboot,
they really should just flush them out.
Sometimes they don't.
And those can be really, really excessive.
And you can have that and a lot of times they get stored
in what's known as a user profile.
So the more users you have on one computer,
each user has a dedicated location
to where if I was to maybe get rid of these files,
well, if we've got four other users
that have accounts on this one machine,
then they also could have run the risk
of having too many files likewise too.
Like I said, Windows Update,
it can generate a lot of files in the background,
as well as, for instance, the Windows Store apps.
It's very easy to get apps
just like in a mobile environment today on your phones.
Well, Windows Store apps, you can download them,
you use them for a little bit,
you forget that they're there and over time, again,
you just start to accumulate a lot of that space
without looking at and really gaining insight
into why your drive is losing storage space.
And before you know it,
you start running into performance issues.
One big one is, another symptom
that I forgot to mention that we need to mention,
is your computer won't print.
That's right.
So your operating system goes through this process
where it actually takes the print job,
whatever you're sending to the printer,
and it writes it to the hard drive
before it sends it to the printer.
Well, if you try to print, and that doesn't happen,
you might even get an error
that says not enough disk space,
and the Print Spooler Service shuts down
and can't do its job.
So these are some of the symptoms
and those are some of the causes
that we definitely have to be aware of.
Well, from here, my friend, what are our solutions?
Because I mean, I know it can all add up,
it can all build up and things we're not even aware of.
What is the solution, Wes?
Well, there are some automated approach
and there's also some of the manual approach.
You got to be a detective and go on the hunt sometimes.
Let me show you one of the first things here.
One of the best little solutions to this,
I'm just going to open File Explorer from the taskbar.
Click on the little folder icon.
And I love the hierarchical view here
because if you select this PC, over in the left-hand side,
notice how my hard drive is red.
The space here is red.
It's telling me that I have literally
one megabyte left of a very small drive, by the way.
It's only 60 gigs, but it's for purposes of demonstration.
But if I right click on that drive, and I choose Properties,
I can come to the location here, you could go to tools,
but right here, notice it's telling me what the Used space is,
what the Free space is, not much left.
So we got to keep an eye on this.
But then I can also use this little button right here,
and it's a Windows Disk Cleanup.
And I clicked it and it run really fast there.
But you can see that there are plenty of things.
Notice it says you can use this to free up.
And this is only telling me about 8.3 MB worth of information.
So I can see right away that even if I do run this
and I put all these checkbox
or make sure all the checkmarks are here,
it's isn't necessarily going to completely
alleviate my problem here.
But you can also, if you're a Windows administrator,
which usually is the first user that's created
during the installation of the operating system,
you can choose this option with a little shield icon,
and that is to clean up system files.
And what that's going to do is it could trigger
the User Account Control and require you to say yes,
because it's trying to elevate your privileges.
But this is where you get…
notice it says here Downloaded Program Files.
I don't have any,
so it increased a little bit, but not by much.
And if we look through here, there's various things,
temporary files, typically; TMP files that it's looking for.
And honestly, I don't even see Windows Updates in here.
Sometimes you'll see Windows Updates in here,
unless it didn't find anything.
And then we just choose okay.
And then it's telling you,
“Are you sure you want to permanently delete these files?”
So we'll give this a second to run.
And you'll see that it's downloading
or I'm sorry, it's deleting these different locations.
And depending on how much it finds,
it could take a very long time.
That one was relatively easy.
So this is a Windows Explorer or file explorer,
as it's been called for a while is a dynamic interface.
So you can refresh it.
- And you'll notice it really didn't do exactly what I wanted, right? - No, it didn’t.
So then at this point, we got to go on a hunt.
So for me, I showed you,
- we went into my documents, right? - Yes.
I could do a CTRL/A in here to select everything.
And then I could just right click on this and I can delete
and notice that it says these are too big to recycle.
And I could say yes to this.
And there, if we go back to This PC,
you'll notice that I'm getting better.
It's still not quite where I want it, but it is a little bit better.
Other things that you could do,
you could manually delete some files
inside of the user’s profile.
Now you do have change the way you view the files
if you will, inside of File Explorer.
And you need to make sure to do this next one.
You go to the View tab up here in File Explorer,
it's the farthest tab from the right.
And then you choose…to the right please…
and then you choose hidden items
because you can't see this by default.
And then we're going to follow a path here.
So we're going to go into local disk C,
you're going to notice that there's a Users directory here.
And these are all the users.
Don't mess with the DefaultAppPool
and this lighter one, that's a hidden file.
We don't want to mess with that.
But I'm in the user profile, Student01, this might be Zach.
If it's your home computer it might be WBryan,
first initial last name if I'm in a company environment.
And I can go in here.
And notice this little AppData file or folder, I mean.
Notice how it's kind of lighter than the rest of them.
That's letting me know, it’s giving me a visual indication
that this is a hidden file.
So we're going to go into AppData,
and what I want to do is I want to go into Local,
and I want to scroll down
and I want to find a directory called Temp.
And you can see it right here.
There it is.
Now if we go into Temp,
you're going to notice there is just a ton.
There is a few.
An absolute ton of these files.
And I can do a CTRL/A here, again, just deleting.
Don't delete the Temp file folder itself.
Not the Temp folder itself.
I got to definitely reiterate that.
The files in the temp folder, you're going to see
it says there's 103 items that Disk Cleanup didn't find.
And I'm okay with that.
For the most part, it did its job,
but it didn't do it so well enough that we can…
we still need to do something manually here.
So you're going to see right here, I’ll end up going ahead
and just pushing permanent delete these files.
There's going to be a couple of files in here
that it's going to tell me that I cannot delete these.
That's to be expected
because even though it's a temporary file and…
it's taken a second here.
Notice it can't delete these files.
These are okay. Leave them there.
Not all of the files.
So I chose the checkbox that said, just skip this file.
Because Skype in this area debug file has to be in here.
Doesn't contain any information right now,
but it has to be in there.
And there's an application
that's expecting that temp file to be there.
One of the final things I'm going to say that you can do,
remember that we talked about deleting applications
that maybe you didn't need.
I could show you how to do that.
So we're going to go back to our little Start Menu.
We're going to right click on it.
And we're going to choose Apps and Features.
You don't have to just start deleting all kinds of files,
or applications,
excuse me, but I'm going to take this CrystalDiskInfo.
I'm going to go ahead and choose to uninstall that.
And it'll take a second.
It'll uninstall it.
And again, here's the User Account Control.
I got to be administrator.
Uninstall some of these programs.
We're going to go ahead and say Yes.
And I'm just going to walk through the Wizard real quick.
And again, just a really quick demonstration
of how we can do this.
So for instance, maybe I've got like a text editor in here
that I don't use because I'm going to go back
to just a default install and use Notepad.
I could choose uninstall.
Again, User Account Control fires off, lets me know,
hey, that you need to be an administrator to do this,
we approve it.
And then we just run the installation.
And it said, do I want to keep custom settings.
I'm going to say No.
Again, because then it'll leave remnants
of that application behind.
We'll choose Close.
And then last but not least, we just go ahead
and we close down our Apps and Features.
And we get back in here and we choose This PC.
And you'll notice now we've gone from one MB left,
now we've got 37.3 gigabytes free.
And these are just a couple of the space
in a couple of locations that you can look
and a couple of other things that you can do.
If you happen to find that you have low disk space,
delete unnecessary files, delete the temporary locations,
use Windows Disk Cleanup, it's a perfect way to go in
and clean those temporary files out,
including things like Windows Updates,
and then from there, you have a pretty good chance
of regaining a lot of that storage space.
You are wise sir.
Now back in the days before you were born,
we used a thing called defrag.
It's still here.
Is that something we use too, or no?
No. Well, we're going to have an episode coming up
talking about file fragmentation.
Good, I can’t wait.
And it's definitely one of those ones
that's going to be important,
especially when you do stuff like this,
where you've deleted large amounts of files.
You have these noncontiguous spaces now
that are on your hard drive,
more mechanical, traditional mechanical drives.
You don't have to worry about it with solid state drives
because the way they delete files is different,
but if you've got a traditional spinning drive,
- mechanical drive… - I have one at home.
Then you're going to need to run a disk defragmenter.
That would be something that I would definitely run,
but we're going to save that one for another episode.
I can't wait. Thank you, Wes.
And thank you for showing us about low disk space, appreciate it.
Absolutely.