With the Windows 10 April 2018 update, Microsoft engineers have included a new feature to recover space in seconds
Do you remember the Windows Disk Cleanup tool? A very useful tool to free up space on our hard drive. Of course, among its best qualities there wasn't intuitiveness and that's why Microsoft decided to replace it with a new tool to recover space on the hard drive.
With the arrival of the new semi-annual Windows 10 update, initially called Spring Creators Update 2018 and then renamed to a more "informal" April 2018, Microsoft engineers have integrated a new feature to clean up the hard drive from unnecessary files and free up Windows 10 space. The tool is located within the (already existing) Memory Sensor section and appears in the form of a simple link. Clicking over the words "Free up space" will launch a tool similar to the aforementioned Disk Cleaner, which will scan our hard drive for unnecessary information and data to be deleted (such as temporary files, data from old Windows installations and so on).
How to free up Windows 10 space with the new tool
Unlike the old Disk Cleaner, the new tool introduced with the Windows 10 April 2018 update only shows files and data that you can actually delete from your hard drive without affecting the full functionality of our computer. The system will analyze both the user's personal folders, such as the recycle bin, as well as system folders and thus locate the files that need to be deleted to recover space on the hard drive.
To start the tool, all you have to do is click on the "Clear Space" item and wait for the "search engine" developed by Microsoft engineers to start its scan inside the hard drive. As seconds pass by, a list of all the files found on your hard drive will appear in the lower part of the screen, divided into different categories. For each category there will be a description, which will help you understand the "old function" of the files and the space they occupy in the storage. In this way we'll know if it's possible to delete the files (in the case of the Recycle Bin, for example, it's worth checking in advance if there are files to restore) and recover space on the hard drive or if, instead, we'll have to keep them "on the back burner".