Why is Disk Cleanup leaving junk on my hard drive?
I bought an Acer Aspire laptop, Q as recommended by Computeractive, and it has served me well. However, although I regularly use Disk Cleanup in Windows to get rid of clutter on my hard drive, Avast Antivirus continually informs me that I have junk, which it can remove for a fee! According to Avast, I have anything up to 15GB of junk, including Windows system restore points and log files. Is there a safe and easy way to remove these – and, if so, why doesn’t Disk Cleanup do it? Michael Young
We assume you’re using Avast A Free Antivirus, because it sometimes shows adverts for other products – including Avast Cleanup Premium. There’s nothing wrong with Avast’s clean-up tool as such, but there’s no need to cough up for it either.
That’s because the Disk Cleanup tool you’re already using can clear out everything your antivirus has flagged up. The specific options for doing so require a little bit of digging, though.
First, launch Disk Cleanup. For the benefit of other readers, click Start followed by Windows Administrative Tools, then choose the relevant drive letter before clicking OK. The box that appears offers tick boxes for all the surface-level stuff Disk Cleanup will erase. If you want to dig deeper, click the ‘Clean up system files’ button (see screenshot 1 ) and select a drive.
This time, you’ll see additional tick boxes – including one to eradicate Windows log files. The option to delete restore points requires further digging. Click the More Options tab, then the ‘Clean up’ button in the ‘System Restore and Shadow Copies’ section (see screenshot 2 ). Then click Delete to erase all but the most recent restore point (see screenshot 3 ).
So that’s how you do it, but the question of whether you should do it is a different matter. Deleting old restore points won’t cause any damage, but there’s a reason Microsoft puts them a little out of reach, and that’s because they can be useful if your PC ever hits a spot of bother. Older restore points can return your PC to how it was last week or a month ago, for example.
As a rule, we’d say that unless you’re really struggling for storage space, there’s little to be gained by removing these potentially useful files.