I bought a laptop around 5 years ago with a 256GB SSD and a 1TB HDD, planning to keep data on the HDD. This worked well until a recent Windows 11 update seemingly started to eat up disk space. At this point, Windows is taking up 77% of my SSD, and I'm feeling pretty stuck. Here's what I've done so far: I've used Wiztree to identify potential files to delete (but didn't see anything helpful), uninstalled unnecessary software, moved my downloads, music, and videos to the HDD, and even disabled hibernation in CMD.
Every time I free up space by uninstalling something, it quickly gets consumed again by Windows. I've run disk cleanup to get about 300MB back, which allowed me to uninstall Adobe Acrobat and free up another 2GB, but I'm not sure how long that will last. I'm open to suggestions but really want to avoid migrating Windows to a new drive or setting up a whole new system if I can help it!
2 Answers
Just a heads up—be careful with BIOS changes as they can risk losing data. Always back up your important files first!
Have you run disk cleanup? It's surprising how much space Windows can take, but usually, it's other files or apps. Have a look at Wiztree and see what the biggest files or folders are. That might give you a clue about what's eating up your space.
I think I have already, but I'll post an image from Wiztree later to show what I’m dealing with.
Good point, I’ll make sure to back everything up before messing with anything like that.