Free PC space is a valuable commodity. Especially when you’re a diehard bastard like me and refuse to buy a new SSD when you need it. Spending money on modest storage upgrades? That’s the way cowards do it. Instead, I spread my backups in a drawer full of old USB sticks and spend an hour or two each month emptying my PC’s internal storage to make room for whatever I’m about to download.
Although deleting even the most trivial files is a pain (if I necessary That Garfield gif later?), most of the data accumulated on the internal SSD can be sent to the digital afterlife with no consequences.
As usual, when I empty my PC’s storage, I sometimes make notes so I can refer back to what I deleted and where I found it. Now, I’m posting these notes in the hope that this map of my deletable data will help others discover and remove internet deposits clogging up their PCs. is published here.
I asked my colleagues at PC Gamer for advice on what to remove and found that there are many similar data hoarding issues. However, I was a little taken aback when associate Tyler Colp admitted that he has over 70GB of Final Fantasy 14 screenshots saved. Too many Final Fantasy 14 screenshots, so I’ll start with the hard drive area.
1. Shadow play highlights that weren’t as cool as I thought at the time (150GB)
Press the Nvidia Shadowplay Instant Replay hotkey to save the final moments of your gameplay as an mp4 and feel like you’ve captured the first compelling evidence of Bigfoot. But when I watch the clip later, it looks like I’m playing an FPS.wow, three kill, cool—or score a Rocket League goal worth a pat on the back at best. Also, there is a lot of random junk in the Shadowplay folder. I just deleted clips from Wreckfest, Neon White, Descenders, Chivalry 2, and a game I played earlier called Turbo Golf Racing. It has been deleted.
2. Accidentally captured desktop video (10GB)
Another easy way to get started: Frequently press the instant replay hotkey you set up for Shadowplay while doing something that doesn’t require instant replay, like writing an email. If you haven’t looked through Shadowplay’s “Desktop” folder (or wherever your recording software hides your desktop video) lately, it’s a good place to look for junk.
3. Games you forgot to install outside of Steam (8.33 GB)
When was the last time you opened Origin and logged in? Did you really uninstall Battlefield 4? What about Mass Effect 3? Worth a visit. And then there’s Uplay, Battle.net, Epic Games Store, GOG download folders, and game-specific launchers. While writing this article, I remembered that I had played Valorant for several months when it was released in 2020, but forgot that I had never installed it. 8.33GB was recovered.
4. Everything in the download folder (270MB)
You have not set your web browser to automatically send files to the officially designated downloads folder in Windows. As god intended, I prefer to manually select a hastily named folder on my desktop every time I download something. Still, something can be stuffed by rogue applications or accidental clicks. probably It didn’t matter.
5. Old Windows update file (2.18GB)
Windilstadt
Tips: WinDirStat (opens in new tab), which stands for Windows Directory Statistics, is a free program that scans your drive and produces a visual representation of all your files. This makes it easy to see what is taking up the most space on your drive.
When you update Windows, the OS keeps a copy of the updates so you can roll back if necessary. If you want to get rid of them, you can.[スタート]Search for the Disk Cleanup app from the menu or taskbar to find it, run it, and select the drive where Windows is installed.[システム ファイルのクリーンアップ]After clicking the button, you will be prompted to select the drive again and then load new cleanup options. What you need is “Windows Update Cleanup”. I had 2+ GB of old updates hanging around on my C: drive, and since I had no reason to roll back yet, I just wiped them out. Some of us live on the edge.
6. Windows.Old folder (12GB)
When you upgrade to a newer version of Windows, it keeps the older version in a folder called Windows.Old on your primary drive in case you want to roll back. Windows will automatically delete this folder after a while. However, if you recently upgraded and want to reclaim space quickly, the Disk Cleanup tool can help. The method is the same as the previous entry. run disk cleanup[システム ファイルのクリーンアップ]Click[以前の Windows インストール]Choose.
7. Many Windows Thumbnails (355MB)
Windows saves thumbnails of images and videos in folders for quick viewing when browsing File Explorer. This is another data cache that can be cleared with the Disk Cleanup application. Windows auto-generates new thumbnails, but you probably didn’t need the 355MB worth of tiny images that accumulated on your Windows drive.
8. Pre-installed Windows apps and other junk programs (1GB)
Why did you install Candy Crush Friends? 256MB. What is Farm Heroes Saga? 276MB. I don’t know how these King.com games got onto my his PC, but they’re gone now. You can sleep soundly knowing all this terribly unwanted data no longer pollutes the quantum field around your PC. Windows Control Panel[プログラムの追加と削除]Browsing the section, you may also find some strange packages placed on your PC. Although it doesn’t free up much space, you can also remove Microsoft apps that you never use, such as 3D Builder, Mixed Reality Portal, and Groove Music.
9. Old beta (18 GB) hidden in EA and Battle.net folders
Did you try the open beta of Battlefield 2042 in 2021 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 this year? Installed the public test server version of the MMO at some point and then forgot about it?
These folders are a space hunter’s dream come true. Deleting them will have no effect, as they are usually large and their beta period ended months or years ago. A recent search didn’t find a beta build, but I did find a tech demo with no reason to keep it. Checked out in April he is the Unreal Engine 5 CitySample demo. 18GB brought back from the matrix.
10. Old mods that are no longer used (1GB)
Mods are ubiquitous and come in many different formats, so searching can be time consuming. Steam Workshop subscriptions, executable installers, compressed zip and rar files, directories organized by mod managers, folders packed into the game’s install directory, and more. Games with built-in mod browsers may also dump them into your Documents folder. Mods with many textures, audio, and other assets can be huge, so remembering I never downloaded and played a full conversion of The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion in 2015, It could be a move to reuse clutch space.
11. Junk game data in the Documents folder (118MB)
Speaking of the Windows Documents folder, it’s not really useful as a place to store documents. Games fill up with save files, configuration presets, and sometimes large data packages. I no longer have Baldur’s Gate 3 installed on Steam, but had 118MB of him stored in the Larian Studios subfolder. I also found 271MB worth of Rocket League replay files, but of course I kept them because who knows when I’ll need to rewatch the goals I scored in 2017.
Of course, be careful with this. You don’t want to accidentally delete valuable save games that aren’t backed up to the Steam Cloud or elsewhere.
12. Backup in the cloud (3GB)
I’m not good at backing up data. I usually let the internal drive accumulate moderately important photos and other information until I have no choice but to dump it into space I can find on various external backup drives. I would never maintain a sloppy physical backup of myself, but mainly backing up my phone and other important data in the cloud, which is far less likely to fail than an SSD or HDD. (Of course, Internet storage services such as Google Drive and iCloud fill up too. It’s a pain.)
13. Junk found in AppData folder (1.75GB)
At some point, I decided I needed to familiarize myself with machine learning concepts, so I started playing around with Python programming and Google’s TensorFlow library. After a few days of struggling to do something interesting, I came to the conclusion that understanding the basic ideas behind machine learning is enough. In any case, why do we need to know if the machine is doing it for us?I abandoned the project but just found 750MB of Python library files in his AppData folder It turns out that the project did not abandon.
The AppData folder is located in your Windows user folder (e.g. C:\Users\Tyler\AppData), but it is hidden.[フォルダー オプション]You should open the menu (you can access it from any folder). File Explorer window), click[表示]in the tab[隠しファイル、隠しフォルダー、および隠しドライブを表示する]Choose. You can also type %appdata% in the search bar.
This is a rather dangerous place to go looking for files you don’t need, as you might end up deleting something a program needs and causing a small mess. If you do find it, we recommend uninstalling the program properly as well as deleting cached data. However, this book alone cannot dispose of everything. I also found a gig of Nvidia Broadcast crash dumps while browsing the AppData folder. I think that’s the price you pay for RTX-powered noise cancellation.
14. Earth (2GB)
Another hidden Windows folder worth investigating is ProgramData in the root directory of your main drive. This is basically the same as AppData. It’s a hiding place for important program-specific data and isn’t always cleared when needed. For example, at one point I tried out Google Earth VR and thought it was a little cool so I got rid of it, but the earth was stored on my PC as a 2 GB database file hidden in C:\ProgramData\Google\VR\ remained in Earth\Earth Data.
Goodbye, Gaia. Use the hole left by your absence to save clips playing Call of Duty.
We may not all enjoy deleting the planet we live on to free up 2GB, but we may be able to find other long-forgotten data hiding here. Hmm. Again, be careful with system folders and don’t delete anything that can be removed by properly uninstalling a program.
15. Games that I haven’t uninstalled because they are small and take up very little space, but now there are about 100 games forgotten at the bottom of my Steam library.
The last one is a guest entry from news lead Andy Chalk. Because I actually have a very tidy Steam library. Rocket League, Rainbow Six Siege, and Ratz Instagib are always installed, and only a few other games are allowed to rotate in and out. All at once. But I think a lot of people can relate to Andy when he writes:
“I haven’t played Edith Finch since November 2017, but it still takes up 2.4GB of drive space. Tiny and Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers has been pristine since May 2018, plus 2.4 GB Kentucky Route Zero: PC Edition, which I haven’t finished yet, and I’ve been waiting to get back to it since September 2013. dozens There are games like this lying around. They’re like water: they don’t look like much when you hold them in a glass, but when you throw them into the ocean, they cause serious problems.”
