subject: Finding Duplicate Files In Windows 7 - How To Find Duplicate Files In Windows 7 [print this page] Are you looking for the easy way to find duplicate files in your Windows 7? A lot of people will advise you to use a program instead. I will tell you a very easy way to find and remove duplicate files by yourself without using any duplicate file finder.
To locate the duplicate files on your computer, you just need to follow the steps below:
Open "Computer"
Firstly, go to your desktop and double click to open your "Computer".
Enter File Name
You need to figure out the possible words that the file names of duplicate files may contain. Enter the words into the Search Box and press "Enter". The search will start automatically and scan your whole computer for files that contain the words.
If you want to search other location, you can browse to the location first and then start the search. Windows 7 will only search the location automatically but not the whole computer.
Compare the Files
After the scan completes, you will get a list of files that contain the words in the file names. Now you will need to carefully compare the files and find out the duplicates. That is an easy job but you need to be very careful because you can delete some useful files by mistake.
Right click the black area, select "View" by "Details". You will see all the information of the detected files, such as file names, file size, modified date, locations and so on. Besides, you can sort the files by types or modified date so that you can easily compare and find out the duplicate files.
It takes only 3 simple steps to find and delete duplicate files in Windows 7 with the above method. By repeating the steps above, you can easily clean up the duplicate files in your computer. But if you have many duplicate files to remove, this method will take you much more time.
Because you need to figure out the words that different duplicate files may use as file name. And when the number of duplicates is very large, cleaning them out of your computer is a large project and it will take you a lot of time.
Furthermore, this method cannot detect duplicate files that don't have similar names. Many files have identical file content with complete different file names. That means you won't get rid of such files if you use this method. How to deal with such situation?
The Best Way to Find Duplicate Files
The best way of finding duplicate files is to use a Windows 7 Duplicate File Finder. A duplicate finder will scan any locations on your computer for the identical files with similar or different file name. Besides, it can save you a lot of time. It takes only seconds to complete the whole search.
