Disk Cleanup Utility. To keep a PC running smoothly, regular maintenance is critical. Many users shy away from maintenance tasks, thinking it is a long, drawn out. Disk Cleanup (cleanmgr.exe) is a computer maintenance utility included in Microsoft Windows designed to free up disk space on a computer's hard drive. If you want to sell or give away or dispose of your system you should first wipe the data from the disk. Just re-installing the Operating System using the original. By Dan Gookin. A handy way to remove lots of files you don’t need on a hard drive is to employ the aptly named Disk Cleanup tool. What Disk Cleanup does is locate. Clean Up Disk Space in Windows to Increase Performance. Do you have a computer that is running low on space because you’re store a lot of pictures, videos, or other large files? Once your computer gets low on hard disk space, normal processes begin to slow down and your computer will run painfully slow. There are of course lots of other reasons why your computer might be running slowly, but this post is specifically for those who know they are running low on disk space. So instead of having to delete files or move things off to USB sticks or external hard drives, you can first try to free up some space on your computer that may be taken up by useless temporary files, old system files or installed service packs. There are also other big space “hogs” in Windows that are set by default to hog disk space and should be reined in as soon as you can! I’ll first talk about these space hogs and then we’ll talk about what tools you can use to clean up old files. Space Hog #1 – Recycle Bin Size. Why pick on the Recycle Bin eh?? The never- irritating and sometimes life- saving trash can just sits there waiting for us to tell it what to do right? Well, it also takes up a LOT of space that it doesn’t need. The recycle bin uses a percentage of your hard drive in order to store deleted files. However, this percentage is set by default at a very high number and ends up wasting a lot of space. Here’s how to fix space hog#1. First right click on the Recycle Bin on your desktop and click Properties. Depending on the OS you’re running, the dialog will look different. In Windows XP, click on the Global tab and you can choose Use one setting for all drives or Configure drives independently. It’s usually better to configure the recycle bin for each drive independently since it’s based on the size of the drive, so 5% of a 5. GB hard drive is much bigger than 5% of a 2. GB hard drive. At the top you’ll see tabs for each partition you have on your computer. By default, the slider bar is usually set at something like 1. Unless you are deleting huge files, there will never be a need for a recycle bin that size. It’s always a good idea to run regular maintenance tasks like Disk Cleanup on your Windows machine to help keep it running smoothly. Today we take a look at how to. A good size is from anywhere between 3 to 5% of your hard drive. Drag the slider bar and you just saved yourself a good amount of space, especially if you have large hard drives. My computer is set to 1% and I’ve never had a problem recovering a file from the bin! In Windows 7, the recycle bin properties dialog looks a bit different, but the same concept applies. Here they just made it a little more efficient by using only one tab. You can click on each partition and see how much space is currently being taken up. Just change the value to whatever you feel comfortable with. On my D drive, which is 1 TB hard drive, the recycle bin was taking up a whopping 4. GB! That is just ridiculous and totally eating up lots of space that could be used for something else. Space Hog #2 – System Restore. Another handy little service that can get your computer back up and running sometimes, but again takes up a lot of extra space that is not needed, is system restore. Also, System Restore only recovers Windows files, not any of your data. So having System Restore enabled on any other drive other than your C drive (where Windows is installed) is completely useless. To fix this one, right click on My Computer and choose Properties. Click on the System Protection link in the left hand menu. This will bring you to the System Protection dialog and here you will be able to see the current configuration for system restore. As you can see from my computer, I have a C, D and G drive of which system restore has been turned off on D and G. Again, this is because System Restore does not protect your data, it only protects Windows system files, so you don’t need it for any other drive other than the main system drive. If you click on the C drive and choose Configure, you’ll get the dialog box to set the amount of space. For system restore, a value between 2% to 4% will be fine. In Windows XP, the default 1. In Windows 7, it seems to be a more realistic value like 5%. I have mine set to 2% and even with that, I still have over 1. I needed to. Space Hog #3 – Hibernate. In Windows 7, you may have a lot of space being taken up by the Hibernate option. Basically, it’s not really all that useful anymore since you can just put your computer to sleep. The main issue with it is that it takes up just as much space on your hard drive as the amount of RAM you have. So I have 8 GB on my machine and so it takes up 8 GB on my small 8. GB system partition or 1. Definitely worth disabling unless you really use it a lot. Luckily, I wrote up a post on how to disable hibernation in Windows 7 already, so go ahead and do that first! Space Hog #4 – System Files. The last big space hog I have encountered on Windows machines are system files. These could be old service pack files, old Windows installation files and all kinds of other system files. The best way to clean these up is to simply run Disk Cleanup. Most people think this is a useless tool, but it’s helped me saved over 2. GB on my hard drive. Have you ever used a tool and found a giant folder called Win. SXS? Unfortunately, you can’t delete it, but you can trim it down in two ways: disk cleanup and via the command line. Open Disk Cleanup and click on the Clean up system files button. By default, disk cleanup loads and will clear out some temp files, etc, but you have to click the button to clean out service pack files, etc. If you’ve never run it, you should see the total amount of disk space you gain value jump dramatically. In my case, I had saved over 6 GB when I had first run it. Now it’s showing only a little bit more because you can see I already cleaned out the service pack backup files. You can also read my previous post on cleaning up the Win. Sx. S folder using the command line, which may reduce the size even further, so make sure to try it. Cleaning Up Other Space Hogs. Now let’s talk about some other areas where lots of space gets taken up. First up are temporary Internet files. If you browse the Internet all the time, but never have cleared your cache out, you temporarily files are probably taking up several GBs of space. I won’t go into detail here about how to clear your search history and cache files because I’ve already written about it. Follow that link and scroll down to the section for clearing browser history for IE and Chrome. For other browsers, just Google it. Beyond this, the other major space hogs are harder to find. In these situations, you have to use a third party program to find out where the space is being taken. For example, if you use i. Tunes and have a bunch of Apple gadgets, the mobile sync directory can be 3. GB in size (it was for me) because of backups performed whenever you connect a device to the computer. Once you know what’s taking up the space, then you can search online for the best way to delete the data. Tree. Size is a program that has a free version, which works great and quickly lets you see what’s taking up space on your hard drive. Using this program is how I found out and an Outlook PST file was taking up 3 GB, my mobile sync folder with tons of old backups was taking up 3. GB and that Win. Sx. S folder was taking up 2. GB! Go through each folder systematically and Google anything you don’t understand before you delete it. The last thing you can do to clean up disk space is uninstall programs via Control Panel and run a program called CCleaner. CCleaner helps automate some of the stuff I mentioned above, so you don’t have to manually do it. If you do everything I mentioned above, you should definitely be getting at least a few GBs of space back unless your computer is already very optimized. If you have any other space saving tips for Windows, let us know in the comments. How to Schedule Disk Cleanup in Windows 7 & Vista. It’s always a good idea to run regular maintenance tasks like Disk Cleanup on your Windows machine to help keep it running smoothly. Today we take a look at how to schedule a basic Disk Cleanup task, and how to use command line switches for a more advanced setup. Schedule Disk Cleanup Basic. Windows includes some handy tools to help keep your machine operating smoothly. One such tool is Disk Cleanup that can remove temp and old files to help you reclaim some hard drive space. You might want to set it up to run weekly or monthly depending on what works best for you. To schedule Disk Cleanup to run on a regular basis we need to schedule a task. For this example we’re using Windows 7, but the steps are essentially the same in Vista as well. Click on the Start Menu and enter task scheduler into the search box and hit Enter. The Task Scheduler opens and you’ll want to click on Action then select Create Basic Task. The Create Basic Task Wizard comes up and from here type in a name for the task and a description then click Next. Now select how often you want Disk Cleanup to run. There is not right or wrong answer to how often you run it. It’s completely up to you and you might want to try out some different schedules. In this example we’re going to select weekly. Since we set it up to run weekly we need to schedule it when to start, how often it reoccurs, and which day of the week to run it. Next under Action select Start a program. When it’s time for the Scheduled Task to occur it will pop up and you can run it by selecting the drive to clean up. Disk Cleanup starts its calculations. Running a couple of command line switches will allow you to select what to have cleaned up and run everything automatically. To open the Command Prompt type cmd into the search box in the Start Menu and hit Enter. With the Command Prompt open type in the following: cleanmgr. That will open the Disk Cleanup Settings dialog box where you can select the items you want Disk Cleanup to delete. You’ll notice there are a lot more options here than when you go through the GUI to cleanup files. After selecting the files you want to be deleted in Disk Cleanup Settings click Ok to close out of the screen. The /sageset: 1 command creates a registry key that saves the settings you entered. Now go in and create your Scheduled Task like we showed previously, but this time you’ll want to add in /sagerun: 1 into the Add argument field. Now when Disk Cleanup runs it’ll retrieve those saved settings you created with /sageset: 1 and you won’t need to interact with Disk Cleanup at all. It will run automatically and clean up the files you selected in Disk cleanup Settings. Task Scheduler Error. When you launch Task Manager in Windows 7 you might get the following error message. It tells you to hit refresh but the error keeps coming back. It doesn’t seem to negatively affect anything you schedule, but it’s quite annoying. On our system, the Disk Defrag Schedule was turned off, so we turned it back on and resolved the issue. On a separate Windows 7 system the Disk Defrag Schedule was already on (which it is by default) and turning it off cured the error. On another machine I had to turn it off then back on to fix the error message. If you find it doesn’t work or have found another solution let us know in the comments. Conclusion. If you use the advanced switches to run Disk Cleanup it actually offers a lot more choices. In the /sageset: 1 switch, “1” is just an arbitrary number. You can enter any number you want, but make sure /sagerun: ”x” corresponds to the number you used in /sageset: ”x”. So you can customize the switches for different types of files you want to clean in Disk Cleanup Settings. For example, maybe you only want to clean Temp Internet files during a cleanup session, then you could do /sageset: 1 and /sagerun: 1 for that. Then if you want to clean up all files you could use /sageset: 1. The switches give you more flexibility in the types of files that are deleted during the Disk Cleanup session. Whichever method you use, or if you just want to run it manually, running Disk Cleanup will keep your drive free of unwanted files.
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November 2017
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