A full hard drive can actually cause your system to slow down considerably. If your hard drive is showing full on your computer, there are probably a couple of culprits.
First of all, maybe you just have too many files stored on your hard drive. Photos and videos downloaded from your phone or camera can really eat up hard drive space, especially if you have a small drive. Consider transferring those files to another drive or using a cloud storage solution to get those files off of your system. Microsoft’s OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive, or a similar product will do the job.
Secondly, it could be that you have a ton of temporary files on your system that you didn’t even know you had. While Windows 10 does an excellent job of cleaning up those temporary files, I have noticed a lot of older Windows 7 systems struggling to handle temporary files. Fortunately, cleaning those temporary files is pretty easy, but you should take care.
One way to delete temporary files on a Windows 7 system is to simply delete the temp folders on your computer. While this is a quick and dirty way of getting rid of those files eating up disk space, you do have to be careful. The temp folders aren’t always easy to find and if you accidentally delete something important, well…
Windows has a built-in utility to clean temporary files from your system, however, I’ve noticed that it really doesn’t work very well. In fact, it barely removes any of the temporary files, leaving you to deal with the problem using another method.
If you can, try downloading a free program like CCleaner (formerly known as Crap Cleaner). Now, I will caution you with this program. CCleaner was always my go-to program when trying to clean up temporary files. However, in recent years, CCleaner has been accused of actually installing malware on your system. While I have not personally had a problem with CCleaner (and I do believe they have cleaned up their act), I would still be cautious. Even so, I still recommend CCleaner as one of the best temporary file removers available – mostly because it works great!