When the computer disk starts to fill up and you may find yourself with a drive full at 75% higher levels, you need to try to free up space. Among the best ways to free up disk space on your Windows PC is to locate larger files and delete them if they are unnecessary or unnecessary.
The search for files on the hard disk allows you to find out which were the most recent created or saved and which of them are large in size .
It is therefore also possible to locate the newest files, the latest ones modified and created by the system automatically or by other users who use the same computer.
Knowing the size of files and folders is extremely useful for saving disk space by eliminating files that are big in terms of MB, which are no longer needed, which are duplicates or old.
In addition to the internal Windows procedures, there are many programs that can search for and display the largest and newest recent files on the hard disk or in a specific Windows folder.
First of all, I remember that, in other articles, we have already talked about the best program for finding files in Windows and all the possible ways to save disk space.
Look for large files in Windows
In Windows 7 and Windows 10 you can search for the largest files in a folder by opening a Windows Explorer window and doing a search.From the Start menu, press on File Explorer and then select disk C or another disk partition where to locate the files.
Press inside the search box at the top right of the window to open the internal file search and bring up the options at the top.
Here you can select the option to search also in the subfolders of the selected one, search by date of last modification, search by type of file and also search by size. By clicking on Size, you can filter the search to find files larger than 128 MB or 1 GB or even a personalized value. To enter a custom value, search directly from the search bar on the right using the formula size:> 100MB to find files larger than 100 MB.
In Windows 10 only, you can see exactly how much space folders occupy on a disk .
Open the Settings from the Start menu, go to System> Storage and click on one of the disks on the screen on the right.
Wait for the scan which will list, in descending order, the largest folders, those with files of a larger size.
Programs to search for large and recent files
As for the external programs that you can download to check the size of the files, identify the biggest ones and also search for recent and latest changes, we have several alternatives.1) File Finder is the fastest program to search for files on Windows by size or date of modification and creation. Really effective and minimalist, the first one that is recommended for this type of operation.
2) The best program to view the size of every single file on your computer and the amount of space in a folder is Tree Size . This software, compatible with Windows 10 and Windows 7, analyzes the folder structure by scanning the disk that operates in the background. Treesize scans disks and partitions separately and makes a tree list of all the folders and subfolders present, sorted by the total size of the files they contain . The tree can be expanded by pressing on the + that appear next to the folders with subfolders, up to the last one in the path. By right clicking on a specific folder it is possible to automatically expand all the subfolders or open the selected paths in Windows Explorer so as to be able, if necessary, to delete the larger files that are inside. Another interesting option is to change the way you view the tree by sorting the folders by name, by size of the files they contain, by the number of files, or by the percentage of space occupied on the hard disk.
3) jdiskreport is another tool that displays the space consumption of each system partition, be it the hard disk or a USB stick / external hard disk connected to the computer. Scanning does not start automatically, you have to select the disk or partition from the left tree and press the top button with your eye. The scan is also very fast because the program does not go into the merits of the individual files but only shows the space occupied in the various folders. The interface is much more beautiful to see and the disk space is displayed graphically giving an immediate glance of the situation and each folder is listed with the relative consumption of disk space. You can see the organization of the PC directories with bar graphs, pie charts or in the classic way, displaying all the files contained in a folder.
4) A simpler and more dedicated program for discovering new and large files is Drive Sort, a tool for Windows that searches, after a quick scan, which are the most recent files and which are the largest ones, sorting them, alphabetically, by name. This program, unlike the other two, is portable, so you can use it without having to install it first and you can copy it to a USB stick. Even if the interface of the program is very spartan and (you don't know why) the window cannot be enlarged, its effectiveness is absolutely to be appreciated as it shows the 100 most recent and new files and the 100 largest ones present on a disk ( hard dik or USB stick). By right clicking on a file, you can open the folder that contains it in Windows Explorer. Since they are listed in alphabetical order, you can immediately see if there are duplicates so as to remove them. Drive Sort is a very small, 9 Kilobyte tool, compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.
However, you can have a more precise detail by using other external programs to graphically display the space occupied on the disk, which work in Windows 7 and Windows 10
