View Windows 10 Disk Usage With Inbuilt Storage Tool

The Windows 10 storage tool simply makes it easy for me to view hard disk usage on my Microsoft surface laptop. It’s a decent disk space analyzer that helps me easily find the junk I can get rid of.

It shows a list of types of files, how much space each category is taking up, and a list of folders sorted by how large their contents are. It’s not quite as powerful as some third party disk space analyzers for PC, but it’s handy enough that many users might not need anything more.

To access it, head to Start > Settings or use the the combination of “WinKey and I”.

Locate “System” and click it.

Find “Storage” in the left flank of System Settings and click on it.

Select the drive you wish to see detail for.

The storage usage, broken down into a set of storage categories will be displayed.

The Storage tool displays disk usage in the following categories:

System & Reserved
Temporary Files
Apps & Games
Videos
Documents
Other
Mail
Desktop
Pictures
Music
OneDrive
Maps
Other People

When you click the categories, you’ll find more details and some controls. For instance, when you click System & Reserved, you’ll see four sections showing the amount of space taken up by various system components, including the hibernation file and system restore.

When you select the Temporary Files category you’ll see the Remove Temporary Files page where you can remove temporary files, clean out the Downloads folder, empty the Recycle Bin, and remove a previous version of Windows.

If you select Apps & Games, you see all the apps and desktop applications you have installed in Windows 10. Adjacent to each application, you’ll find the amount of space that app is using and when it was installed. Clicking an app icon reveals an Uninstall button.

The Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos, OneDrive, and Desktop categories aren’t all that useful, as they simply allow you to open the respective folders in File Explorer and view those files.

If you need an alternative to the storage tool to analyze hard disk space on your Microsoft surface laptop, you can try TreeSize Free which you can download from the Microsoft store.