With the passage of time, our hard drives are filling with all kinds of files. Many of them junk and unnecessary. Therefore, one of the most basic maintenance tasks for any computer is to clean hard drives and free up space. Although we often use third-party applications, Windows has its own program to free up space , a very basic and simple program that simply does its job without compromising the other data on our PC. However, what happens when, for some reason, the Windows 10 space freer is not available?
Windows has many inexplicable flaws that randomly affect users. And one of them affects the space liberator of Windows 10, preventing users from using it normally.
How to open Windows space liberator
Windows 10 Space Free is included by default in the operating system; It is a characteristic of Windows. To access it, we simply have to open a File Explorer window, go to the “This computer” section, select a hard disk with the right mouse click and open the “Properties” window. In the new window that will appear we can see a button called ” Free up space “.
Clicking on this button will automatically open the Windows Disk Cleanup. This is very easy to use. We can see a series of elements, with what each one occupies. We must select everything we want to delete and click on “OK” to start the cleaning. As we can see, we have two interesting buttons. The first of them, ” Clean system files “, which will show us advanced options to free up more space, and the second, ” View files “, which will allow us to see the files to be deleted before deleting them.
Once we have selected everything we want to delete, we simply accept the window and the wizard will free up the space on our hard drive. When it finishes, we will have more free space on the PC. This tool is totally safe. Of course, we must be careful with what we select or do not select, since among the options that appear we will find the “Downloads” folder on our PC. And this could make us lose important files.
What happens when this tool doesn’t work
If for some reason this tool is damaged, what we will find is that, when clicking on the ” Free space ” button, instead of opening the section to choose what we want or do not want to delete, a window will appear File Browser. This window will point to the Windows System32 directory, and leaves the user free to delete whatever they want.
This is very dangerous. System32 is a key directory for Windows 10 operation, and seeing this folder when clicking on free up space can be confusing. And some users may start deleting things from here. We should never do this.
If the Windows 10 space freer has broken, then we can repair it and get it to work normally again.
Repair tool to free up hard drive space
Generally, the problem is that either the ” cleanmgr.exe ” tool has disappeared from the Windows “System32” directory (which we can manually check to see if it exists), or the registry file that points to that program has been removed. .
In the first case, the only thing we can do to make the tool work normally again is to restore it, either by copying it from another PC or performing a Windows repair. In the second case, we simply have to make a small change in the Windows registry to get it working again.
We execute the command “regedit” inside the Windows 10 search engine, and in the window that appears we will navigate to the following directory:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE> SOFTWARE> Microsoft> WindowsCurrentVersion> Explorer> MyComputer
Once here, what we will do is enter the registry key “cleanuppath” and we will find inside a value called “(Default)”. We open it with a double click and we will make sure that its value corresponds to the following as it appears in the screenshot:
% SystemRoot% System32cleanmgr.exe / D% c
We accept, close regedit and ready. Now we can try to open the program again to free up Windows space, and we will be able to see how the Windows disk space freer works correctly.
Storage Sensor: An alternative to space freer in Windows 10
Windows 10 not only has this classic disk space freer (which has been part of the operating system for many years), but it also has another, more complete and intuitive tool to keep our hard drives clean: the Storage Sensor.
This space-saving program came with one of the Windows 10 updates and, thanks to it, it is possible to forget about programs like CCleaner and the like. He allows us to analyze our system to see the data that can be eliminated, it gives us more control than the one offered by the Windows space liberator. Plus, it even allows us to schedule regular cleanings.
The Windows Storage Sensor is found under Settings> System> Storage.
