How to Clean C Drive in Windows 11 (Boost PC Performance)

Howdy folks, Brett here. Coming up I'll show you the various ways to clean your C drive in Windows 11 to easily reclaim storage space, speed up system performance, and reduce lag. Let's dive right in. A good place to see what is taking up the most space on your C drive is to open the settings app. To open it, in the taskbar, right-click the start menu and select settings. You can also open it using the keyboard shortcut which is the Windows key plus I key. In the left pane, select system. Then here on the right, select storage. Wait for this to finish. To see every category taking up space, click on show more categories. Now that you know what is taking up space, you can now take action. All these here can be clicked on to get more detailed information. The big one here for me is installed apps, so let's go there first. Freeing up space on your C drive can make your PC faster. Keeping at least 10 to 20 percent of your drive free provides the operating system necessary breathing room to create, swap files, cache data, and perform background system maintenance. As many of you know, I test a lot of software free and paid, so for most of you it won't be taking up as much space. For each program that you don't use or plan to use, uninstall them. So when you find a program to get rid of, go to the three dot menu here on the right and select uninstall. To confirm, click uninstall again. If you have a lot of programs that you don't use that you end up uninstalling, that should free up a lot of space. After uninstalling everything that you want to get rid of, select the back button here in the upper left corner. Otherwise, you can go to system and then storage like we did earlier. Let's now go into temporary files. It's completely safe to remove all of them, so click to check the box next to those you want to remove, starting at the top here with downloads. I have a setting in storage sense, which I'll show you coming up, so I'm getting a warning here. You may see more or less than what I have. Check thumbnails, device driver packages, Microsoft Defender antivirus. There's other ones here as well, so check all those boxes. And when you're done, go back to the top and select remove files. You'll get this confirmation and warning. Click on continue. Let's go back and go back one more. In storage management, there's a utility called storage sense that will automatically free up storage on your PC, which comes in handy. Turn it on if you haven't done so already. Click into it. Here at the top, make sure the box is checked next to keep Windows running smoothly by automatically cleaning up temporary system and app files. In automatic user content cleanup, make sure it's enabled. Let's scroll down here a bit. In configure cleanup schedules, you can set the amount of time for when these get deleted automatically. I'll go through these quickly. To run storage sense, I have it set to every week. Your other options here are every day, every month, and the actual default is during low free disk space. For delete files in my recycle bin, if they've been there for over, I have it set to 30 days, which is the default. Your other choices here are never, one day, 14 days, and 60 days. Earlier in the temporary file segment, you saw I got a warning there for deleting files in my downloads folder. I have the setting here for default for delete files in my downloads folder if they haven't been open for more than. Your other choices are one day, 14 days, 30 days, and 60 days. Scroll down here again. The last one here in locally available cloud content, content will become online only if not open for more than. That one I have on never. Your other choices are one day, 14 days, 30 days, and 60 days. At the bottom, there's a button here to run storage sense now if you want. Let's go back again. Also in storage management is cleanup recommendations. Select it. This built-in storage management feature analyzes your drive and categorizes files you can delete to free up space. Different categories here are temporary files, large or unused files. Scroll down here. File sync to the cloud. The last one, unused apps. I'll caution you that it may recommend deleting files that you want to save, so be careful with this one, especially in the category large or unused files. In this category, there's nothing in cleanup recommendations that I want to get rid of, but if you find some you want to delete, select them, and after that, click on cleanup, and it'll show you how much space it's cleaning up. In this case, that would be 3.71 gigabytes. Another utility built into Windows I've shown in other videos is disk cleanup. To open it, go to search in the taskbar and type disk cleanup. Select it. Select the proper drive if you have more than one drive. In this case, that would be the C drive. Most of the options here are the same as I showed you earlier in storage, so there's really not much to delete here at this moment. Check the box next to all that you want to delete. When you're done with that, click on cleanup system files. Click OK. When that's done, you'll have other new cleanable items like Microsoft Defender antivirus. Scroll down here a bit. Device driver packages, temporary files, thumbnails, and sometimes you'll see Windows update cleanup in here as well. Like before, check all the boxes that you want to clean up and select OK. It'll ask you, are you sure you want to permanently delete these files? Select delete files. Then just wait for it to finish. Thanks for watching. If this video was useful for you, give it a thumbs up and let us know in the comments. Also, let us know if you have any additional methods to keeping your C drive clean. 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