Disk clean pro vs dr cleaner windows 10#
Disk clean pro vs dr cleaner Pc#

Note also that the Downloads item represents the contents of your personal Downloads folder, so don’t delete it unless you’re sure you don’t need anything it holds.įigure 1 includes a previous Windows 11 installation, for a total recovery of 12.7GB. Don’t delete old OS versions or updates if you think you might want to roll back to an earlier version. The numbers in the right column indicate how much disk space each item occupies. Scroll through the checkbox items in the pane labeled “Files to delete” and pick stuff you’d like to lose. Ed Tittel / IDGįigure 1: When you run Disk Cleanup as an administrator, you can remove “Previous windows installation(s)” and other OS files. Why? Only then does it offer to clean up redundant or outdated OS files (such as old OS files after an upgrade, or old updates) as well as other Windows leftovers.Īfter Disk Cleanup scans your system, Figure 1 shows a reasonable facsimile of what you’ll see in Windows 11. If you can, select Run as administrator from the resulting options menu. The Disk Cleanup desktop app should appear at the top of those search results. To launch Disk Cleanup, type disk clean or cleanmgr.exe into the Start menu search box.

Disk clean pro vs dr cleaner windows 10#

Either the Settings or Disk Cleanup approach provides a great way to excise extraneous and unneeded Windows files (for Windows 10 and 11 versions across the board). Even so, the Disk Cleanup utility remains ready, willing, and able to work in Windows 11 22H2 as I write this story. There has been speculation that Disk Cleanup might disappear as Settings takes over Windows management and controls. In Windows 11, this shows up as “Cleanup recommendations.” In Windows 10, users gained a second method to clean up disk space: the “Free up space now” option is part of its Settings-based “Storage Sense” facility aimed at optimizing storage. Step 1: Run built-in Windows disk cleanup toolsįrom time immemorial, Windows has included a utility for cleaning up disk space - namely, Disk Cleanup, also known as cleanmgr.exe.

Best of all, the tools that help you tidy up won’t cost you a dime. This is exactly what is explained and explored here, with plenty of examples and screen shots to illustrate the cleanup process.

That’s why it’s a good idea to practice regular disk hygiene. Indeed, all those files need not necessarily be kept around.

Disk clean pro vs dr cleaner Pc#

My Windows 11 production PC has over 970K files and 275K folders, for example. A more complex, application-heavy system disk might contain between half a million and a million files. These days, a relatively clean and uncomplicated Windows 10 or 11 system disk might be home to more than 250,000 files and 90,000 folders.