Reinstall windows 3.1 !

Apparently Windows 11 automatically empties your recycle bin and removes old files from the downloads directory?

Errius: I have Win11, but it doesn't seem to exhibit the behavior you mention. BEEN_Nath_58: If you don't know which files you can delete, I recommend compressing them. On modern Windows, there are two good ways to compress files on a hard drive/SSD: 1. compress executables using UPX, and 2. use the Windows file system. UPX seems to do better, even though it has to add extra code to the file to support in-place decompression, but only works on executables, while the Windows file system method should work on nearly all modern Windows hard drives or SSDs. There's a link to UPX at https://dosprograms.info.tt/indexall.htm under the first update list. In order to compress via the file system, right-click the file or folder you want to compress, click Properties... then Advanced then check Compress then OK, and the file/folder will be compressed. I hope this helps.

It's old restore points.

Go to advanced system settings in the system control panel, then go to the data protection tab.

Either reduce the allowed size to something sensible, or delete all the resore points.

The space will be magically freed.

Oh. I didn't know that. 🙁 At least I tried. 😀

wierd_w wrote on 2026-03-08, 23:29:

It's old restore points. […]
Show full quote

It's old restore points.

Go to advanced system settings in the system control panel, then go to the data protection tab.

Either reduce the allowed size to something sensible, or delete all the resore points.

The space will be magically freed.

Yeah system restore can eat up lots of room. A while back a friend had a laptop that decided 50% of the drive should be allocated to system restore and he kept saying things like "why is the drive so full? It's new!"

wierd_w wrote on 2026-03-08, 23:29:

It's old restore points. […]
Show full quote

It's old restore points.

Go to advanced system settings in the system control panel, then go to the data protection tab.

Either reduce the allowed size to something sensible, or delete all the resore points.

The space will be magically freed.

I had turned off system restore a long ago, it is probably something else

Try Wiztree to get a graphical representation of what's eating your space.

Likely some or all of:
Installers for updates
Windows update backup files, which are saved even with System Restore off. Use Disk Cleanup to get rid of these
Temp files
The page file, as it grows over time the longer it's been since a restart. On my work computer it can grow from 10gb to 32gb and then I'm out of disk space