Summer is just around the corner and the steam summer sale has already begun, which means you need to find some space for all the new games you’re unwillingly going to buy. If you’re like me and have an Solid State Drive (SSD) for your Windows installation – and if you’re once again like me and bought a tiny one (120gb) with the idea that it would be big enough. You will quickly notice how fast it fills up and it can be tedious work to find where the space is being occupied, so if there only were a tool to help us analyze this – oh wait!

Analyze your hard drive space

I used a tool called WinDirStat which gives you a good way to quickly see where most of the space hogs are, I found out a few things that was hogging up all the space on my C-drive – Virtualbox was one of the bigger ones for me – but I also found out that a lot of space was used in my AppData folder, but that one is harder to clean up.

I managed to free up about 20Gb of storage space and I’m working on freeing up even more so that my computer has the space it needs for the programs and application data and so on. This program also reminded me that my bigger hard drive was in dire need of defragmentation, I found that this simple tool helped me a lot and clearing up old crap that was just lying around – and moving everything from my desktop and My documents. If you’re not a Windows user, the same tool exist for Linux as well.

Free up space and delete unnecessary files

When you’ve done your part and finding the disk space hogs and removed them accordingly it can be a good idea to use the built in tool in Windows 8 to free up even more space – this tool is called Free up space by deleting unnecessary files and can be found by searching for it. This tool can only cleanup a minor amount of space, but everything helps.

Hopefully you’ve successfully cleared up enough space to be able to install some of the new and awesome games that are on sale this summer, my C-drive won’t be able to hold any games but at least enough to make my computer work smoothly once again.