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.
66GB of junk. 5GB of items it left unticked, so it overstates the real total.
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