Free Up Disk Space by Cleaning your Hard Drive with BleachBit

When it comes to computer maintenance, there are many things you should be doing to make sure that your computer is running smoothly, securely and safely. Of course, knowing how to properly manage your files and folders and perform regular file backups is essential to be a proficient Windows user.

One common problem many people run into is that their hard drive starts to get too full or even runs out of room completely. There can be many reasons for this, but one common reason is because you have not performed any drive cleanup tasks. Windows and other applications will add things such as temporary files, update files and other unnecessary items to your computer that need to be cleaned out from time to time. In this article, we will be showing you how to free up disk space by cleaning your hard drive with BleachBit.

BleachBit is a free program you can use to remove temporary and other unneeded files from your hard drive. They have an installable version and a portable (standalone) version that does not need to be installed. You can download BleachBit from their website here.

When you run BleachBit, you will see the available items that can be cleaned on the left hand side. They are broken down into categories such as deep scan, system, and Windows Explorer. You should also see entries for your web browsers there as well.

To free up your disk pace with the BleachBit app, simply check the boxes next to the items you want to have removed. Just be sure that you know what you are checking so you do not delete anything that you really don’t want to have removed.

Some of the things you can select will give you a description of what will be removed.

Other selections will give you a warning telling you that you should preview the files before you have them deleted.

While other selections will give you a warning telling you that it can take a long time to delete the selected files.

There is even a clean free disk space option under the System category.

At the top of the app there are additional options to do things such as shred files and folders.

You can also change how the program operates from the Preferences section.

We will now select the items we want to have cleaned from our hard disk and click the Preview button so we can see what will be deleted before we have BleachBit delete the files from our hard drive.

As you can see in the image below, some of the items will show you how much disk space will be cleaned. There will also be a summary at the bottom showing the total space that will be regained after the cleaning process is run. It will also show you how many files will be removed.

If everything looks good, you can click the Clean button to have the files removed from your hard drive. You will receive a warning telling you that these files will be permanently deleted from your drive. You can then click the Delete button to continue.

There is a good chance you will get some error messages during the cleanup process if a file is in use, or you do not have permission to delete it for example. You will also get errors if you have your web browser open and try to delete browser data. Generally, you do not need to worry about these errors and will just not be able to delete the files. If they are browser related, you can close your browser and try again.

When the cleanup process is complete, you will be shown a summary of what was removed at the bottom of the screen. This will most likely not match exactly what you were shown during the preview step.

The number of files that will be removed will vary depending on the options you have checked and how many removable files there are for those selections.

As you can see, it’s very easy to free up disk space by cleaning your hard drive with BleachBit. Another effective disk cleanup tool you can try is called HDCleaner.

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