In this tutorial you will learn how to reclaim the hard drive space in Windows 10 by shrinking it. When you will install a freah copy of Windows 10 it will take up 15GB of space and most of the space is being occupied by system and reserved files. Approx. 1GB of space is taken by default applications and games which come with Windows 10. 1GB space may not look a lot but if you are using a laptop with 32GB or 64GB space, this space is sufficient enough. You can reclaim the space by uninstalling default Windows 10 applications. You can also learn How to Reduce Windows 10’s Booting Time.
Uninstalling Default Windows 10 Apps:
The applications that are pre-installed with Windows 10 do not take much space of your hard drive but they add up as well as clutter the Start menu. You need to uninstall the ones which you don’t need. For uninstalling the apps you need to follow these simple steps.
- 1st of all you need to open the Settings from the Start menu.
- Now you need to click on System.
- Now click on Storage and then select the C: drive in the right pane.
- Now you are required to click on Apps & features.
- Now click on apps and then on uninstall button in order to uninstall the application.
Here you need to take a note that some of the applications like Groove Music and Xbox, Maps, Mail and Calendar and Xbox can’t be deleted or uninstalled from your OS. IN order to get rid of them you are required to use Powershell commands.
Saving Space by Turning OFF Hibernation:
Whenever you hibernate your PC all of your opened documents will remain there and your PC will save the current state of the computer. You can instantly resume the work when you will turn the computer ON again. If you don’t want to use hibernation mode you can easily disable it by getting rid of hiberfil.sys file. This hiberfil.sys file takes several Gbs of your storage device.
- 1st of all you need to open a Command Prompt in Administrator Mode and that can be done by right clicking on Windows Start button and then selecting the Command Prompt.
- Now you need to click Yes if User Account Control asks whether to let the Command Prompt to open.
- In the Command Prompt window you need to type in powercfg-h off and then press Enter.