FREE UP SPACE

How can you ensure your PC doesn’t run out of storage? Nick Peers has some pointers…

- Nick Peers

“YOU HAVE RUN OUT OF DISK SPACE.” There it is, unequivocal. It wasn’t that long ago that Windows started popping up “You are running out of disk space” messages, swiftly followed by “You are running very low on disk space.” No matter, the day has finally arrived. Your hard drive has finally run out of space, and now you have to do something about it. The question is: What?

These days, running out of disk space should be impossible. With terabytes of storage available to you, how do you manage to fill it all up? One reason might be that you don’t actually have terabytes to start with—perhaps you’re using a laptop that only came with 128GB, or a two-in-one tablet whose 32GB is barely enough to fit Windows on, never mind any apps or data.

Don’t panic, though, because over the next few pages, we show you everything you need to know to solve the problem. You’ll learn to spot the early warning signs, plus take steps to keep your hard drive as clean as possible. We also examine ways to add extra capacity, enabling you to move your data off your boot drive to free up space. And if all else fails, we show you how to upgrade your PC’s boot drive, plus migrate everything from the old to the new drive. It’s all here, so turn the page to solve your disk space issues.

MONITOR YOUR DRIVE SPACE

Find how what happens when you run out of free space, and how to keep an eye on how much is left