I am at my wits end. My laptop ( which is small 57G hard drive because I only use it for word docs and PDFs) keeps eating up half of the 14G of space I have. I downloaded CCleaner and paid for Pro, as suggested by copilot, but no matter how many times I run it, it either doesn’t clean up much, or it freezes. (It freezes ALOT) What is going on? Copilot talked me through a thorough cleanup, which got most of my space back, but I am again loosing about 1G a day. (I use copilot on my phone, not my laptop - because I know it uses a lot of space) This is a ridiculous amount of time to spend on maintaining a device that is supposed to be efficient .Is it just a lemon machine and I should ditch it,? Or could an in person tech help me find out what is going on?
What operating system are you using?
57GB is way too little drive space for modern Windows.
(It was OK for XP or Vista but not for Win 8, 8.1, 10, or 11).
Was this previously used for a school pupil? I’ve come across a few 5 or 6 year old school specification laptops that were sold with just 64 GB of storage, - they struggle to run Windows 10, and grind to a halt if you try to put Windows 11 on them.
If you can change the drive then I’d suggest you fit at least a 250 GB SSD.
Any computer shop can change a drive and copy everything off the old drive to it, you can even DIY, I’ve done it several times on different machines.
However many of those ‘school spec’ laptops have soldered in memory rather than a swappable drive.
If you can tell us the make and model we can look it up.
If you can’t change the drive for a larger capacity one then the options would be to install Linux or Chrome OS Flex instead of Windows, neither one uses as much drive space.
You do need to be a bit techie to do either of those though it’s not very difficult. It will never be very good though.
Thanks for your response. I bought it new a couple of years ago. It’s an Asus with windows 11. For a short while ( because I was sick) I was working from home with large image files, and I think that messed it up. I have now reset it, and even with Word and Swifdoo i now have 20G to spare. Hoping I can squeeze I bit more life out of it … but CCleaner seems like it’s pointless, esp CCleaner pro ..
Could you say what model of Asus it is?
It would be very unusual for a computer that’s only a couple of years old to only have a 57/64 GB drive fitted; Particularly if it was sold with Windows 11 on it.
(The Asus laptop with Windows 8.1 that I bought 12 years ago had a 1 TB drive fitted, and that wasn’t unusual at the time).
I’m wondering if in fact you have a much larger drive that has been partitioned to have a smallish ‘C:’ drive for the windows system and a larger ‘D:’ drive for storage? (There may even be 2-drives, typically a SSD for the Windows System and a larger HDD for storing files on).
If that is how your computer is set up then you should be storing files on ‘D:’ and not on ‘C:’.
Could you open File Explorer and on the left you should see your drive(s) listed.
Right click on the ‘C:’ drive and select ‘Properties’ from the pop-up menu.
Post a screenshot of the properties window, similar to this one:
(If you use the Windows snipping tool to take the screenshot then you can just paste it straight into your post, that’s what I did here).
|Processor|Intel(R) Celeron(R) N4020 CPU @ 1.10GHz (1.10 GHz)|
|Installed RAM|4.00 GB (3.83 GB usable)|
|Graphics card|Intel(R) UHD Graphics 600 (512 MB)|
|Storage|38 GB of 58 GB used|
|Device ID|8DE6FD5E-B832-4048-B58E-3FD0ABC5D540|
|Product ID|00356-07254-10594-AAOEM|
|System type|64-bit operating system, x64-based processor|
|Pen and touch|No pen or touch input is available for this display|
VivoBook_AsusLaptop E410MAB_L410MA
Looking at the specs on the Asus website it looks as I thought and your particular laptop is a ‘Basic’ budget machine intended for school* or very light home use.
It would normally come with Windows 11 S-mode installed, so you can only get applications from the Microsoft Store.
(I assume you got CCleaner from the MS Store).
It has 64 GB of eMMC storage, but the user can only see about 57 or 58 GB of that.
eMMC is soldered in and so you can’t swap it for more storage.
*When used for school all the work that the student does is uploaded onto the schools servers, so the laptop itself doesn’t need much storage, just about enough for homework.
(It also prevents the kids from putting games etc. on it).
I can suggest 4 things:
1: If you can afford it then get a better spec laptop with at least a 250 GB NVME drive.
2: If you want to keep using that laptop then get an external drive that plugs into a USB port.
Then move and keep all your own files on that, leaving the internal eMMC just for Windows itself to use.
If you have a techie friend, or a local computer shop they can fairly easily set it up so that whenever you save anything it goes onto the second, external, drive rather than the small internal storage.
3: instead of an external drive use OneDrive or other cloud storage to save your files to.
(A bit like school students use the school server).
4: A bit more technical, but as I said above junk Windows and put Linux or Chrome OS Flex on it.
(Chrome OS Flex saves all your files to the cloud storage in your google account).
In the end as I said at the start.
64 GB is not really sufficient to run Windows 10 or 11 on and you are always going to struggle for storage space.
Using CCleaner regularly to clear the junk, browser caches, etc will help, but I’m afraid that you will always be fighting a losing battle with Windows 11 on that little storage space.