// ENGADGET — HARDWARE & GADGET
You might be neglecting the one thing that keeps your PC healthy
Most people know a desktop PC needs cleaning now and then. The usual advice is physical: Open the case, clear out the dust, check the fans. We've covered that in our guide to cleaning and organizing your Windows PC. But there's a second chore that gets far less attention: the junk piling up inside Windows itself. Microsoft ships a few tools for it, 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. What follows is what each tool offered to remove.
We tested three tools on a single 1TB C: drive with only about 4 percent free.
Disk Cleanup is the oldest. Microsoft has shipped it with every version of Windows since Windows 98, and it has barely changed: Pick a drive, wait for a short scan, tick the usual suspects (temporary files, thumbnail caches, the Recycle Bin) and press OK.
Storage Sense lives in Settings > System > Storage. Instead of a one-off scan, it's meant to work in the background, emptying the Recycle Bin, clearing Downloads and removing 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 runs a deeper scan and sorts what it finds into categories.
Disk Cleanup offered to free a meager 1.66GB of junk. Storage Sense offered the exact same 1.66GB, while PC Manager listed 26GB, but that figure includes things that aren't actually junk, such as 15.5GB of items it left unticked, so it overstates the real total.
To see which number to trust, we measured the drive manually and found that it holds roughly 20GB of real junk. Disk Cleanup and Storage Sense found about 8 percent of it, while PC Manager's list covered about 90 percent of the actual junk files. The biggest offenders were a 9.25GB NVIDIA shader cache, about 5GB of Chrome cache across four profiles and 2.2GB of app crash dumps. Both Windows tools missed all of them. PC Manager found them, along with a few caches that developer tools like Python and Node.js leave behind.
There is little reason left to run Disk Cleanup. Microsoft says the tool overlaps in function with Storage Sense, and the test shows why: Storage Sense's "Temporary files" list matched Disk Cleanup's exactly, category for category. Same engine, same cautious rules, and Storage Sense does more on top.
Storage Sense is the better tool, but it's built to work quietly in the background, and on the test drive it did nothing. Windows reported "0 bytes" cleaned in the past month. By default, it only runs when disk space is low, and apparently Windows doesn't count 3.9 percent free as low. Items from six months ago were still sitting in the Recycle Bin.
The fix is a setting. Open Settings > System > Storage > Storage Sense and change Run Storage Sense from During low free disk space to every day, week or month. The Recycle Bin and Downloads thresholds can be set anywhere from 0 to 60 days.