If you want to quickly free up memory space on your Windows PC, the best way to do it is to find large files on your Windows 10 PC and get rid of them when you no longer need them. However, the question is, how will you search for large files on your computer?
Windows provides you with several ways to find all the large files stored on your disks. Either you can use the built-in tools on your computer to find these files, or you can get a third-party application to do this task for you. In any case, you will find files that take up a significant portion of your memory.
Once such files are found, you can decide what to do with them. If you don’t want to delete them permanently, you can move them to cloud storage or an external hard drive.
Find large files in Windows 10 using File Explorer
File Explorer has many hidden features to help you organize, sort, and find files on your computer. One of its features is to help you find files of a certain size on your computer. Using this function, you can find these files taking up a lot of memory and delete them from your PC.
However, before doing that, you need to enable the hidden files option first. This is necessary so that Explorer not only searches for regular files, but also looks for large hidden files.
However, be careful when working with hidden files. In most cases, these are system and application related files that, if removed, will cause your applications to crash and even crash your entire system. Before you delete anything, make sure you know what it is and you should be fine.
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Open the Start Menu, find “Show Hidden” and click “Show Hidden Files and Folders”.
When the dialog box opens, click the View tab at the top. You will see various File Explorer options that you can change.
Find the option labeled Show hidden files, folders and drives and check the box for it. Then click OK to save your changes.
Double click this computer on the desktop to launch File Explorer. When the utility starts, click on the search box in the upper right corner.
The new menu item is added to the top of the screen. Click the newly added item labeled Search to see more options.
Select the Size option, and then select the appropriate option from the list. This will allow you to find large files available on your computer.
If the file you think is large is not available in the default menu, enter size:> 1 GB (replace 1 GB with your size) in the search box and press Enter. It will only search for files larger than the size you specified.
When the search results appear, right-click anywhere in the empty space and select Sort By, followed by Size and Descending. This will ensure that the largest file is shown at the top of the results.
Search for large files in Windows 10 using Command Prompt
If you are a more interesting person, you can use the command line utility to get a list of all files that are larger than a specified size. The list of files can be exported to a text file so that you can find these files on your computer.
Press Windows + R, type cmd and press Enter to launch the utility.
When it starts, type the following command and press Enter. It will find all files larger than 1 GB. You can change the value in the command so that it finds files that you think are large.
forfiles / S / M * / C “cmd / c if @fsize GEQ 1073741824 echo @path> largefiles.txt
Open the newly created largefiles.txt file and it will list all the large files stored on your computer.
Use the largest file finder to find large files in Windows 10
File Explorer and Command Prompt aren’t the only tools for finding large files on a Windows 10 computer. There are also several third-party applications that can help you find such files.
Largest Files Finder is one of those applications that will help you find the 100 largest files on your computer. He claims that it only takes a minute to scan drives up to 200 GB in size. Plus, it doesn’t require installation and works right out of the box.
- Download and run the application on your computer.
- As soon as it starts, it automatically starts searching for large files on your computer. When this is done, you can check the results yourself.
If you want to remove any files from the search results, you can easily do so from within the application. Just right-click any file and select “Delete.”
Find largest files on Windows 10 using TreeSize Free
TreeSize Free has been around for quite some time and helps you find files that take up a lot of space on Windows computers. Little setup required but then it works like a charm.
- Download, install and run the application on your computer. Be sure to run it as an administrator so that it can perform folder searches that would otherwise be impossible.
- You will see your folder tree along with the space they occupy on the screen. You can double-click any folder to view its subfolders and their sizes.
You can then sort the directories by the Size column so that the largest files always appear at the top.
It also has a few configurable options if you want to use them. Feel free to experiment with any options that you think will make it easier to find large files on your computer.
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