Free Up Wasted Space with Disk Cleanup

Wed, 07/21/2010 - 10:09 — Florina

After showing how to use the Windows 7 Disk Defragmenter, I will continue with another program that is meant to improve your computer's performance - Disk Cleanup. This program will remove unnecessary files from your hard disk, leading to more free space and a bit more performance from your computer. In this article I will present all the advantages that Disk Cleanup has to offer, where to find it and how to use it.

How Disk Cleanup Works and Where To Find It

There are several ways of increasing your computers' performance - running Disk Cleanup is one of them. This tool will reduce the number of unnecessary files on your computer to free up disk space and help your computer run faster. Disk Cleanup allows you to remove temporary files, empty the recycle bin and remove a large variety of system files and logs. Therefore, running this utility from time to time is advisable for your computer.

There are several ways of finding Disk Cleanup. You can type disk on the search bar in Start menu, and from Programs choose Disk cleanup.

The second way is to go to 'Start Menu -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup'.

How to Cleanup Your Computer

Once you open Disk Cleanup, the first thing you have to do is to choose the drive you want to cleanup. Click the drop-down box to select the desired drive and press the OK button.

For a few seconds or minutes, depending on the size of your drive and its contents, the utility will compute the amount of space that Disk Cleanup will be able to safely free up. An image like the one below will appear during this process.

When done analyzing, Disk Cleanup shows the total amount of space that can be cleaned. Scroll to the 'Files to delete' list to see different categories of files that can be deleted, like 'Downloaded Program Files', 'Recycle bin', 'System error' files, 'Temporary files' and others. For example, I am able to free up 8.71GB of files on drive 'C:', of which 8.05GB are 'Temporary files'.

Select one of the categories to see its description. For some of the categories, Disk Cleanup allows you to see the files that can be deleted. Click the 'View files' button if it appears.

Decide if you want to delete the files from one or more categories by selecting the appropriate check boxes. Press OK when you have finished.

A confirmation box like the one below will appear. Press 'Delete files'.

You will see the progress of the Disk Cleanup on a window similar to the one below.

After the cleanup, the program will close itself. To run the process for another drive, start it again, select the drive and run the process again.

Extra Cleaning Options

Apart from files, Disk Cleanup can free more disk space by allowing you to remove programs that you don't use and all but the most recent restore point. To do all these, click on the 'More Options'tab. NOTE: You must be logged in as Administrator to see this tab.

If you don't see the More Options tab, you will have the button 'Clean up system files' in theDescription zone. You will have to enter the administrator password.

To remove unused programs, click on the 'Clean up...' button under 'Programs and Features'. This will open the Programs and Features Control Panel, that allows you to see the list of all the programs installed on you computer and uninstall them.

Disk Cleanup allows you to remove all restore points except the most recent one. Under 'System Restore and Shadow Copies', click on the 'Clean up...' button.

A confirmation box for system restore points deletion will come up. Press the Delete button to remove the restore points.

Conclusion

Disk Cleanup is an important and yet underrated tool which helps improve the performance of your computer, by allowing you to free space used by temporary files, system files and others. If you have any questions about Disk Cleanup or any tips to share, don't hesitate to leave a comment. For more useful tips, look on the list of articles recommended below.