Cloudeight Windows Tips and Tricks

Using Windows Vista's Disk Cleanup

There are many features in Windows Vista that have the same name as features in earlier versions of Windows, but work differently. Windows Vista's Disk Cleanup is one of them. In Windows XP Disk Cleanup worked but it works better in Windows Vista. It's much more thorough, and therefore, much more useful.

Why should you use it when there are so many free "cleaner" programs around? Good question. Most of the free cleaner programs don't clean certain Windows created files unless they have extensions like *.tmp, *.bak, etc. But there are other junk and useless files that are created during Windows normal use that, after time, can clutter up your hard drive, wasting space and slowing down your computer by making Windows search more for what it needs. If Windows has to search more that means slight delays in your computer's response time. Maybe these little lags are not so noticeable to you, but as your computer ages, they will become noticeable at some point in time. You've all had it happen. You click a link to open a program and there's a lag between the time you click and the time the program opens.

Some of the files that Windows creates can be quite large. And they can be quite useful -for a time. Take Windows "dump" (*.dmp) files for example. They're created when you have an application crash or a system crash and immediately after the crash they can be useful for troubleshooting problems on your computer at the time that may have contributed to the crash. But, six months down the road, those dump files are doing nothing but taking up space and cluttering your hard drive with unnecessary files. Most system cleaners you can download free won't remove these files, because, as we've said they can be valuable - but they're time sensitive. The more time that passes the less useful they are.

So, it's a very good idea to run Windows Vista Disk Cleanup every month to clean up any of these leftover, but unneeded files. Disk Cleanup will, of course, clean up any temporary or other junk files too. Vista's Disk Cleanup is a very important, but often neglected tool that can really help you keep your system in tip-top shape. Regular maintenance should include Windows Vista Disk Cleanup - and you should get in the habit of running it once every month.

Let's run Windows Vista's Disk Cleanup. Before you start we strongly suggest you shut down all running programs and don't work on any projects, emails, or browse the Web while Disk Cleanup is running. It can be a resource hog at times and it will slow down and even momentarily freeze your computer. So let it do its work while you go have a cup of coffee or do something else. Just a word to the wise.

Click Start and type in Disk Cleanup in the search form at the bottom of the start menu. When Disk Cleanup appears at the top of the start menu, click it to start it.

The following dialog will appear:

If you select "Files from all users on this computer" Disk Cleanup will remove all unnecessary dump, temp, and other junk for your user account and all others on your computer - but it will take longer to run.

If you have multiple hard drives, the next dialog lets you select the drives you want to clean up. Unfortunately, you can only clean one drive at a time. You cannot select multiple drives to clean in Windows Vista Disk Cleanup.

Select the drive you want to clean, and click OK. Then, sit back and relax or grab a cup of coffee. It's going to be awhile. Disk Cleanup with scan the selected drive for files that can be safely removed. Sometimes this process can take 15 or 20 minutes. After it's indexed the drive and found all the files it can remove, it will give you other options - for example ask you which of these files you want to remove. Normally, you can safely remove them all. So, if you don't have any particularly good reason for not removing something, let Disk Cleanup do its job unhindered - in other words, let it remove what it shows. You'll have to check each item in order to remove it. If there's something (like MS Office installer files) that Windows recommends that you leave on your computer it will notify of this. So go through each item to make sure there's no recommendation of saving the files.

You're almost done. You still have one more chance to not delete files found by Disk Cleanup:

As you can see, we've deleted 6+ GB of junk/garbage files on one of our backup drives (H). That's a lot of space to be wasting! We recovered over 20GB of space from our Windows drive (C) using Disk Cleanup despite the fact that right before we ran Disk Cleanup we had run several top "cleanup" utilities.

We recommend that you run Disk Cleanup once a month - it's a good habit to get into and can really make a difference in how much hard drive space you have and how fast your computer responds.