Cleaning Up with Disk Cleanup

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The simplest way to make room on any drive is with the help of the Disk Cleanup utility, Cleanmgr.exe. If you click a "low disk space" warning, this tool opens automatically. You can start it manually at any time by choosing the Disk Cleanup shortcut (from the All Programs menu, choose Accessories, System Tools). If you use this option, Windows prompts you to select a local drive letter. To begin working directly with a local drive, right-click the drive icon in the My Computer window, choose Properties from the shortcut menu, and then click Disk Cleanup on the General tab of the properties dialog box.

Most of the Disk Cleanup options are fairly self-explanatory and merely consolidate functions scattered throughout the Windows interface. For instance, you can empty the Recycle Bin, clear out the Temporary Internet Files folder, and delete files left behind by Indexing Service. (Avoid cleaning out the Downloaded Program Files folder, which contains generally useful ActiveX and Java add-ins.) Using these default settings, the Disk Cleanup utility is strictly an interactive tool. Each time you run the utility, you must select options you want to run and then click the OK button to actually perform the cleanup.

The Disk Cleanup utility includes one confusing option that can leave an inordinate amount of wasted space on your hard disk if you don’t understand how it works. When you run Disk Cleanup, one of the available options offers to delete Temporary Files—the accompanying Help text explains that these are unneeded files in the Temp folder. Unfortunately, this option may display a value of 0, even if your Temp folder contains tens or even hundreds of megabytes of useless files. The reason? Although the Help text doesn’t explain it clearly, this value lists only files in your Temp folder that are more than one week old. If you want to completely clean this folder out you’ll need to do so manually. Close all running programs and type %temp% in the Run dialog box; from the resulting Windows Explorer window, delete everything you find. You may discover that some files are not available for deletion until you reboot.
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