How to Check Your PC's Storage Capacity

PCs & Laptops For Dummies

To take a quick glance at storage capacity on all your PC's mass media devices, open File Explorer and wander over to the This PC window. Follow these steps:

Press Win+E. The File Explorer window appears.
Choose This PC from the items listed on the left side of the window. You see an overview of storage available to the computer, similar to what's illustrated here.

The PC's storage overview.

At a glance, you can determine the capacity for your PC's storage. The blue part of the thermometer is used space; the gray part represents available space.

When available space gets too low, the thermometer is colored red, which helps you quickly identify hard drives with low capacity. You must deal with this situation if you want to continue to use the drive.

For more details on storage, right‐click the drive and choose Properties. You see the storage device's Properties dialog box. On the General tab, detailed information about the drive's used and free space is shown, as illustrated here.

Storage details for Drive C.

Here, you see that the drive's total capacity is 465GB. It's a 500GB drive, but the actual storage capacity of the media is less due to overhead and a given number of bytes taken by the government for tax purposes. The more important figure is Free Space, which as shown here is generous.

When free space falls below 10 percent, Windows displays a warning message regarding free capacity. When you see this message, act immediately.
Optical discs are always full. They show a red capacity bar in the This PC window. This condition holds true even for writeable discs.
The name This PC is awful. In older version of Windows, it was called My Computer, which seems more descriptive. O, Microsoft!

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.