Sep 23, 2015 - How to find remaining hard drive space in Windows 8, 7, and Vista. This blog post was created to help people who do not know how much disk. When too little free space is available on your computer hard drive, Windows updates might not install, apps. Step 1: Run HP Performance Tune-up Check.
Determining the amount of available hard drive space will vary depending on what operating system you're using. To proceed, select your operating system from the list below and follow the instructions.
Note
Memory (RAM) and hard drive space are two completely different things. If you want to know how much memory your computer has, see our page on how to find how much RAM is installed on a computer.
Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 10 users
- Press the Windows key + E to open File Explorer.
- In the File Explorer window, on the left navigation pane, click on This PC.
- After selecting This PC, you will see a section called Devices and drives.
- Each storage device has a status bar, as well as a description of how much memory is free and the total disk space.
If you would like to view additional information, right-click the drive and select Properties from the drop-down menu that appears.
Windows 95, 98, NT 4.x, 2000, ME, and XP users
- From the Windows desktop, double-click the My Computer icon.
- Within My Computer, highlight and right-click the drive whose capacity you'd like to determine.
- In the menu that appears, select Properties.
- The Properties window displays the used space, free space, and the total capacity of the hard drive or other drives.
Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP users
If you are running Windows 2000 or Windows XP, My Computer also displays the total size and free space for each of the drives in the main window. If you want to view more information, as well as a graph of available space, follow the steps above.
TipYou can also view the available space through MS-DOS.
MS-DOS and Windows command line users
Open the MS-DOS prompt.
To determine the available space on a hard drive using MS-DOS, we recommend that the 'dir' command be used.
At the MS-DOS prompt, type:
At the end of the directory listing, you will see information similar to the example below.
As you can see above, the hard drive has over 16 GB of free space. If you want to see all files and how much space they are occupying, type the following commands.
The above command will list all files on your computer (except the hidden files) and give you the total amount of disk space they utilize, as well as the free disk space.
- See the dir command and cd command pages for further information about each of these commands.
Windows 3.x and NT 3.x users
In Windows 3.x or Windows NT 3.x, you can determine the available free space by highlighting the C: drive, and then looking at the status bar at the bottom of the screen.
TipYou can also view the available space through MS-DOS.
Linux and Unix users
Additional information
The stuff you create and collect on your PC’s hard drive — the primary storage device — can grow to colossal proportions. Yet while all that stuff accumulates, the hard drive itself doesn’t change from its original capacity. It’s like a closet: You can keep buying new clothes, but it doesn’t make the closet any larger.
The hard drive is the PC’s primary storage device. It’s home to three vital items:
- The computer’s operating system: Windows
- The software — programs and applications — that let you do things with your computer
- Your stuff: files, documents, media, and other things you create or collect
The ideal situation is to have a hard drive that boasts a capacity to hold all three things, not only for now but also for as long as you plan to own your computer. Most people, sadly, aren’t that forward-thinking. Not only that, but the casual computer buyer also doesn’t have a clue to how much storage is enough. So they buy less than they need.
You can check on how the hard drive is doing. How much space is being used? How much space is available? How soon before you run out? These questions can be answered by following these steps:
- Open the Computer window.In Windows XP, it’s the My Computer window.
- Right-click the main hard drive icon and choose Properties from the shortcut menu.On the General tab, you see detailed information about disk usage as well as the handy purple pie chart, illustrating disk usage.
- Close the disk’s Properties dialog box when you’re done looking.
- Close the Computer/My Computer window.
The more purple you see in the pie chart, the better, because purple is the Free Space chunk of the pie. The smaller the purple slice, the sooner you’re due for a disk capacity solution.
Your options are to remove files, compress files, or compress the entire disk to recover some space. Another solution is to buy a second hard drive. The most complex solution is to replace the hard drive, though that strategy can be quite technical.
At what point do you worry? I’d say when utilization reaches 80 percent, it’s a good time to start seriously cleaning up a hard drive. Even before that point, however, you should prune away things you don’t need.
- When hard drive storage (free space) ever falls below a certain percentage, Windows displays a warning message. If you see the message, act immediately to clean up your hard drive or install a second drive.
- The term hard drive applies to the PC’s primary storage device. It’s known on most PCs as drive C, though it can be another drive letter or you can have multiple hard drives inside your PC.
- The typical PC is sold with a hard drive capacity of about 300GB. That’s fine for most usage, though more is always better.
- Perhaps the best solution for dealing with the storage situation is a hardware one: Get another hard drive, either an internal or external model. More important, use that hard drive.
- Another storage space solution is to remove software you don’t use.
- Optical discs are always shown as being full. That’s because they’re read-only. When you’re burning a new optical disc, the software you use to burn the disc reports how much space is available.