You May Be Neglecting the One Thing That Keeps Your PC Healthy

Most people know that a desktop computer needs cleaning from time to time. The usual advice is physical: open the case, dust it off, check the fans. We talked about it in our guide to cleaning and organizing your Windows PC. But there’s a second task that gets much less attention: the garbage that accumulates inside Windows itself. Microsoft provides a few tools for this, and we wanted to know how well they work, so we ran a scan-only test of each on the same drive. Nothing was cleaned and nothing was deleted. The following is what each tool offered to delete.

We tested three tools on a single 1TB C: drive with only about 4% free space.

Disk Cleanup is the oldest. Microsoft has shipped it with every version of Windows since Windows 98, and it’s barely changed: choose a drive, wait for a short scan, check the usual suspects (temporary files, thumbnail caches, Recycle Bin), and press OK.

Meaning of storage lives in Settings > System > Storage. Instead of a one-time scan, it’s supposed to run in the background, emptying the Trash, clearing downloads, and deleting temporary files on a schedule.

Microsoft PC Manager is a free, separate install that bundles a one-click boost, a storage cleaner, and a few extras. Its storage page does a deeper scan and sorts what it finds into categories.

Disk Cleanup offered to free up a measly 1.66 GB of junk files. Storage Sense offered the exact same 1.66 GB, while PC Manager listed 26 GB, but that figure includes items that aren’t actually junk, such as 15.5 GB of unchecked items, so it overestimates the true total.

To find out which number to trust, we measured the disk manually and found that it contained about 20 GB of real junk files. Disk Cleanup and Storage Sense found about 8 percent, while PC Manager’s list covered about 90 percent of the actual junk files. The biggest offenders were a 9.25 GB NVIDIA shader cache, around 5 GB of Chrome cache across four profiles, and 2.2 GB of application crash dumps. Both Windows tools missed them all. PC Manager found them, along with a few caches left by developer tools like Python and Node.js.

There is no reason left to run Disk Cleanup. Microsoft says the tool overlaps with Storage Sense’s features, and the test shows why: Storage Sense’s list of “temporary files” matched Disk Cleanup’s list exactly, category by category. Same engine, same caution rules, and Storage Sense does more.

Storage Sense is the best tool, but it is designed to run silently in the background and when tested it did nothing. Windows reported “0 bytes” cleaned in the last month. By default, it only runs when disk space is low, and apparently Windows doesn’t consider 3.9% free space to be low. Items from six months ago were still in the trash.

The fix is ​​a setting. Open Settings > System > Storage > Direction of storage and change Run the meaning of storage Since In case of low free disk space every day, week or month. Trash and download thresholds can be set between 0 and 60 days.

PC Manager was by far the most comprehensive tool in the test. He estimated that 8.9 GB could be safely deleted, mainly browser caches, crash dumps and temporary files. It left NVIDIA cache (9 GB) and Python (2.7 GB) unchecked, so the decision on this remains with the user, which is very wise.

PC Manager also offers a Manage large files option. It lists the largest files on your disk, so you can decide which ones are worth keeping and which can be deleted. Nothing is judged for you; the app simply shows where the space goes. In our test drive, it found 238GB of files larger than 10MB. It’s not perfect. It goes after Boost and health checks, and some of what it releases is cache that will grow back anyway. Still, it’s a good option to have.

When most people want to free up space, they open Installed appschoose the ones they no longer use and hit Uninstall. The problem is that many programs do not start cleanly. Folders, caches and registry entries often remain in the background. Revo Uninstaller Free handles this better: it first runs the program’s own uninstaller, then searches for remaining files, folders and registry entries and offers to delete them.

CCleaner was the default recommendation, but ignore it. It has since turned into bloatware and its trust issues are known: in 2018, Avast’s Piriform removed version 5.45 after finding that it collected more usage data than users expected.

If you want to keep a clean computer, you don’t need much. Configure Storage Sense to run weekly or monthly and perform a deep clean of PC Manager once a month. When you delete an app, use Revo Uninstaller so nothing is left behind.

Don’t expect miracles, though. Removing every unwanted byte during our test drive only moved the free space from about 4% to about 6 or 7%. To really clean up the space, you’ll need to eliminate the usual culprits: video games, video files, photo libraries, etc. If your drive is almost full, use PC Manager’s large file finder tool to see where it all went, then decide what’s worth keeping. Our guide to seeing what’s taking up space on your Windows PC goes over the rest.