Early Saturday morning, I received this question via email:

Running low on space on my laptop. I’ve already backed everything up to my hard drive, but I was wondering if there were programs or a way to look at like what are the big ticket space eaters on my computer so I can delete line by line? Or anything like that you recommend? Thanks!

Wow, this is a question I’ve had to answer for myself many times on Windows devices. Here’s what I shared with this person:

Several steps you can take:

1) WISE Disk Cleaner

WISE Disk Cleaner will clean hard drive. It works great; I use it all the time. However, as great as it is, if your data is being taken up by your own data, you will find the next program below helpful

2) See your hard drive in visual way with WinDirStat

You can use this free program to see what files are taking up the most space on your hard drive. Watch this short video.

A final program you can run that is similar to WISE Disk Cleaner is Bleachbit.

3) Bleachbit

If you get the portable version of these apps (if available), you don’t have to install them…they can run off your desktop.