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I'm sure there are cleverer IT boffins on here that can help me out
I have a laptop for DJing, it's Lenvo Ideapad 320s-14IKB which came with a 120gb of storage. On this drive is Windows 11, Spotify, DJ software (Rekordbox) and a handful of other small DJ related applications. I keep all my music on a physically separate drive which is 1tb.
I am very diligent and ultimately this laptop is used for DJ work and nothing else. Nothing!
My issue is the original the 120gb hard drive is filled up with 96gb which I can't understand. Looking into this via settings I can see 70gb of installed apps, sorting the apps the largest is 959mb (Windows 365) then it's six 500mb apps, rest is all sub 100mb apps.
How can I find out what is taking up all the 96gb of space, it really makes no sense to me
Thanks!
Tree file size is free and useful to see what and where everything is
There are disk cleanup tools in the settings. Media apps often cache huge amounts of data. You can clear that out, but then it will just rebuild the cache. I would recommend installing a bigger SDD, they aren't expensive. 120 GB is at the low end of a useable Windows machine.
Also, delete old rollback files and temp files from any OS upgrades. They can take up huge amounts of space. Once you've checked that the upgraded OS is working ok, you can delete them.
magic!!! spotted the guilty apps. Garmin Express which Windows said is a 586mb app had 20gb of map data in it
I would recommend installing a bigger SDD, they aren’t expensive. 120 GB is at the low end of a useable Windows machine.
This.
Windows itself will take up space, the C:\Windows folder on this PC is 20GB+ and I can't imagine W11 is any smaller than W10. If the machine is as bought then there will likely be an OEM recovery partition containing whatever the original loadout was. And there will be (hidden) support files like the swap file and hibernation file both of which will be several GB in size. Treesize (free download) as above will tell you where your storage is being used and Disk Cleanup will remove temporary files.
Really though, storage is comparatively cheap these days. Just swap the drive with something bigger and forget about it.
That sounds identical to my missus' Lenvo Ideapad 320s-14IKB, is it the 8th gen intel processor in there?
If so then it probably has a space inside for a standard ssd drive - what I did on hers when it got full was to put a 1tb drive into that space for all her "stuff" freeing up the 120gb drive for windows and apps. It saved me having to do a reinstall as well, which was nice.
Treesize (once again) is awesome especially if you have an AMD GPU that never deletes the temp files from updates!
And x2 for a bigger SSD, if nothing else it'll get rid of the crap Lenovo pre-package the Ideapads with (I have one as well).