You can use WinDirStat to see which folders are taking up space in your disk.
Disable Search Indexing
In order to speed up the search process, the Search indexing service scans through the files and folders on the Windows system and records information about them in an index file. But it also consumes some resources from the system, so if you are performing searches once in a blue moon then it would be better to keep this feature disabled. Here are the steps to disable search indexing in Windows 10.
- Tap on the Windows-key, type services.msc, and tap on the Enter-key. This opens the Windows Services Manager.
- Locate Windows Search when the services listing opens. The services are sorted automatically, so jump to the bottom to find it more quickly.
- Right-click on Windows Search and select properties from the menu.
- Switch the startup type to “disabled”.
- Select “stop” under service status to block the service from running in that session.
- Click apply and then ok.
- Go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb and delete your Windows.edb file.
Clean up your hard disk
Unnecessary files on your hard disk take up disk space and can slow down your computer. To clean up your hard disk, follow these steps:
Step 1: Use CCleaner
CCleaner removes temporary files, empties the Recycle Bin, and removes a variety of system files and other items that you no longer need.
Step 2: Use Windows 10 Disck Cleanup to delete System Restore and Shadow Copies
- Open File Explorer.
- On “This PC,” right-click the main system drive and select Properties.
- Click the Disk Cleanup button.
- Click the Cleanup system files button.
- Click the More options tab.
- Under “System Restore and Shadow Copies,” click the Cleanup button.
- Click Delete to confirm.
Step 3: Clean the AppData folder
If you use NetBeans, you can delete the NetBeans cache folder. You can find the folder here.
C:\Users\Myuser\AppData\Local\NetBeans\Cache\
Step 4: Clean the NVidia clutter files
Anyone who has had an NVIDIA graphics card for any length of time has hopefully already discovered that the installer for the display drivers and the software associated with these cards leaves behind quite a few files that are no longer needed once the installation is complete. To make matters worse, each time you update your drivers and software yet another set of files is added to the machine without deleting previous installer files. This means that over time these files just keep adding up and eating away at your hard drive space. This becomes more and more of a problem, especially with so many people using lower capacity SSDs. It’s also a problem for people like me that keep regular system images of our machines as backups. These images can get massive if you aren’t cleaning up the junk on your machine before imaging.
The first thing we need to cover is where exactly NVIDIA stores these files we want to get rid of.
The Geforce Experience Download Folder
If you install Geforce Experience and let it handle driver and software updates for you automatically, then this is the folder where it keeps copies of all it’s downloaded files. This folder is located at:
C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\Downloader
Note that the files in this folder are NOT all safe to delete. Only the folders that appear as a random string of characters are to be deleted. These are the archived installer files. The other files and folders are needed for Geforce Experience to keep track of it’s download history. You want to make sure you do not delete the config and latest folders. Also do not delete the gfeupdates.json or status.json files.
The Geforce Experience Driver Repository
Newer versions of the Geforce Experience program are designed to keep a repository of past drivers, which should allow you to rollback to an earlier driver if you are having issues with a current build. These files are located at:
C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Installer2
I’ve personally never found the need to try and rollback a driver with this method. I’m not even sure exactly how you would go about it in the Geforce Experience software. I certainly don’t think you need multiple version of the drivers stored here as well. Windows also keeps a repository of every driver ever installed so this seems redundant to me. Generally these will get removed automatically if you use the Perform Clean Installation option when installing new drivers. But who does that? I never use this option unless I’m having some sort of problem I need to resolve. Otherwise all it does it force you to redo any customizations to your driver configuration.
Now delete all folders inside this folder. Do not delete the Installer2 folder itself.
For more you can see this article.
Step 5: Disable Windows 10 Hibernation
Windows 10 arrived on your system with the hibernation feature turned on by default. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially for those with masses of storage. Hiberfil.sys is the hibernation storage file keeping track of your system vitals. It stores key settings required by the operating system to turn on, quickly.
The size of this file relates directly to the amount of installed RAM on your system, and can take up to 75% of that amount. For instance, if you have 8 GB RAM installed, your hiberfil.sys could take up to 6 GB of storage. The more RAM you have, the more space the file will consume.
If you have no need for hibernation, you can easily turn it off.
Open an elevated Command Prompt by right-clicking the Start-menu and selecting Command Prompt (Admin). Now type
powercfg /hibernate off
And that’s it. Done. If you wish to re-enable hibernation mode, simply type powercfg /hibernate on.
Step 6: Move thunderbird mail profile folder
If you have a lot of mail at C: and want to move them on D:, you can do the following:
- Create a new folder, eg. D:/Thunderbird
- Copy the old profile folder. You will find it in C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles
- Paste the profile folder inside path 1, eg. D:/Thunderbird/Profiles
- Open the Profiles.ini file. You will find it in C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird.
- Change “IsRelative=1” to “IsRelative=0” (non-relative/full path)
- Change the “Path=” line to the actual location of the new profile folder, e.g., Path=C:\Profiles\newprofile. If you’re using Windows non-relative paths use back slashes while relative paths use forward slashes so you may need to change the direction of the slashes too.
If you are moving a profile from its default location, the original profile folder can now be deleted.
Start Thunderbird.
Defragment your hard disk
Fragmentation makes your hard disk do extra work that can slow down your computer. Auslogics Disk Defrag is a vital maintenance tool that will improve your PC’s performance by defragmenting and re-arranging files on your disk.
See this post for more.
Detect and repair disk errors
You should always check the integrity of the files stored on your hard disk by running the Error Checking utility.
As you use your hard drive, it can develop bad sectors. Bad sectors slow down hard disk performance and sometimes make data writing (such as file saving) difficult or even impossible. The Error Checking utility scans the hard drive for bad sectors and scans for file system errors to see whether certain files or folders are misplaced.
Switch Off Unwanted Windows Features
Windows Features offers a great way to enable/disable specific Windows features. You can load it by clicking Control Panel > Programs > Windows Features on or off. Here identify which features you don’t need and disable them to avoid the resources usage. Just like I don’t play much of the default windows games, so I have kept them disabled.
Disable Unwanted Start-up programs to speed up System Start-up
Some programs are set to start during system start-up. These might slow down the start-up process. Programs that are not really needed during start-up can be disabled. For this, do the following:
- Click Start. In the search box type msconfig and press Enter.
- In the System Configuration window (refer figure), go to Startup.
- Uncheck the box next to those processes that are not important for start-up. This will disable them.
- Once you’ve disabled the processes, click Apply and OK.
Avoid high CPU usage from svchost.exe
You can run resource monitor and see which process is lagging you system.
Set the Manage Virtual Memory (Pagefile)
Pagefile in Windows 10 is a hidden system file with the .SYS extension that is stored on your computer’s system drive (usually C:\). The Pagefile allows the computer to perform smoothly by reducing the workload of the physical memory, or RAM.
Simply put, every time you open more applications than the RAM on your PC can accommodate, the programs already present in the RAM are automatically transferred to the Pagefile. This process is technically called Paging. Because the Pagefile works as a secondary RAM, many times it is also referred to as Virtual Memory.
The minimum and maximum size of the Pagefile can be up to 1.5 times and 4 times of the physical memory that your computer has, respectively. For example, if your computer has 1GB of RAM, the minimum Pagefile size can be 1.5GB, and the maximum size of the file can be 4GB.
Change Mysql database location for wamp
WampServer installs Mysql upon its installation. All the Mysql databases are stored in wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.5.24\data\, you might want to change the location where all your databases are stored. The steps are simple.
Step 1: Open my.ini folder in D:\wamp\bin\mysql\mysql5.5.24, location upto bin\mysql\mysql5.5.24 is same for almost all the cases the remaning location may vary depending on where you installed your WampServer.
Step 2: Now, Start editing my.ini file search for the following line as shown and change it to desired location as shown.
datadir="c:/wamp/bin/mysql/mysql5.7.14/data"
to this
datadir="d:/desired_folder"
Step 3: Left click on WampServer icon in the taskbar and then restart all services