Before you install any new software, it is necessary to check whether the available disk space is sufficient for such installation or not. Here are a few steps to find out the same.
Hard drive is a non-volatile storage device that is used to store digital data. The first one was made by IBM in 1956. If you want to install a new software, it is better to know the availability of free space, so that you are sure you will be able to install the software properly on your system. If you are indeed running out of space, you may want to know how to clean computer hard drive. Uninstalling software that are not required will help you to free some memory space.
On Windows
- Click on ‘Start’.
- Now go to ‘My Computer’ from the menu.
- Right click on the ‘Local Disk (C:)’ icon.
- Then select ‘Properties’ from the drop down menu that appears.
- You will be able to see ‘Used Space’ and ‘Free Space’. With this you will know the amount of space that is used and the amount that is available.
- Repeat the same on other drives as well.
Alternately, you can double click ‘My Computer’ icon on the desktop. Right click the hard drive icon, and select ‘Properties’ from the drop down menu. In the window that pops up, you will be able to see all the information that you need, along with a pie chart.
On Mac
The easiest way is to open your hard drive folder from the desktop. The status about the amount of space available will be displayed at the bottom of the status bar, in the window that appears.
- Alternately, you can go to System Profiler and click the Apple icon located to the top-left corner of the screen.
- Now click the ‘About This Mac’ option.
- In the window that appears, click the ‘More Info…’ option.
- When the new window pops up, go to the ‘Hardware’ tab and then go to the ‘Serial-ATA’ tab.
- You will now be able to see information about the available space, whether it is writable or not, type of file system, among other things.
On Linux
Finding out free space on Linux and Unix is indeed easy. The command to use at the shell prompt is, ‘$ df’. It will display the amount of disk space available on the file system, along with the file name argument. If there is no file name available then the space available on all currently mounted file systems will be displayed.
Now that you know the steps to find out empty space, you will be free to install a number of software. If you are running out of space then you can uninstall the software which you do not require.