Disk Cleaner on Windows 7 - Not worth the risk

[Xenon_Slayer]

Wow, it feels like ages since I've had the chance to take a quick look at the Off Topic forum. As you have seen, we've been spending a lot of time pushing out X4 patches and whatnot.

However, I had an additional task this week. Setting up a brand new work PC as Windows Disk Cleaner decided that eating part of the operating system was a good idea. I believe I was running one of the last Windows 7 PCs in the office, mainly as I couldn't be bothered to upgrade and also so we could test the game on W7 systems. However, as it was an old installation, data on the C drive was at a premium, especially as it was a 128GB SSD.

I've used Disk Cleaner multiple times, perhaps even as recently as two weeks ago. What happened next was partially my fault as I should have aborted as soon as I saw something weird. When I set Disk Cleaner to look at additional system files to cleanup, it displayed something like "Temporary files - 48GB". That was clearly an impossible number but guess what, I showed a colleague, we had a laugh, and I pressed OK as it was obviously just a UI bug.

Wasn't a UI bug.

After the cleaning was done, the drive looked ok. 48GB wasn't mysteriously gone, it had only freed up around 5GB, which was what I expected. However, I went to open a text file and... Windows doesn't know how to open this file type. "Uhoh..." Long story short, it was FUBAR. On restarting it went into a recovery loop which at that point I did some digging and found this article who seemed to have the same issues as me.

So, seeing as that guy had not found an answer, I bit the bullet and spent the next few days jumping between our backup PC to work on patches and my work PC to get it set up with a Window 10 install. It's finally done! No important data was lost but it was a major pain.

I'm still running W7 at home and I hardly ever use Disk Cleaner there. There are several free alternatives which at this point I would trust to do the job better. Just thought I'd put the warning out there for anyone else still using this aging OS.

[pjknibbs]

That was clearly an impossible number but guess what, I showed a colleague, we had a laugh, and I pressed OK as it was obviously just a UI bug.

I think we identified the real source of the problem here, frankly. Don''t click OK on anything without being sure what's actually going to happen, and in this case, I would have done a web search for Disk Cleanup reporting impossibly high values before I went anywhere near OK. Even if this *was* just a display bug, the fact Disk Cleanup is capable of exhibiting such bugs ought to have given you some pause, surely?

Oh, and the linked articles suggest this problem isn't limited to Windows 7--if you have corrupted Registry entries for the Disk Cleanup folders, it could happen on any OS. Quite why Microsoft programmed the thing to search from the root if the "Folder" entry is missing is beyond me--if I were writing this application I'd make it fail safe in all cases, so if there's no "Folder" entry it would do *nothing*, not delete the entire contents of the hard drive!

[Terre]

Every time you update a driver Windows keeps a back-up, in the FileRepository, over aggressive dick cleaners try, and often fail, to identify redundant drivers.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... d40d9b9283

I have have used Display Driver Uninstaller to remove 18GB of dead drivers from a system folder.
https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/di ... nload.html

[Morkonan]

I've never used Window's "Disk Cleaner/Cleanup" whatsits... Because I've never trusted it. For temp files/caches, etc, I generally use CCLeaner. But, I also don't generate a lot of crap or have as many different installs as may be found in a hard-working business-environment productivity machine. And, I don't usually worry about a few gig of excess orphaned system files.

Note: Whenever I have seen what appears to be a misreported amount of data that is que'ed up to be "cleaned," it's always a rendering app that created the cache/temp file. And, sometimes when that data is removed, the actual data that was deleted is much less. I don't know why. It may be that there's some discrepancy there between what was reserved and what's actually in the cache?

[red assassin]

If I'm doing disk cleanup, I do it by hand with WinDirStat or a similar tool. Safer and more effective.

[Morkonan]

This used to be my go-to-tool, back in the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTree

I... loved that thing in a purely platonic way. Mostly purely.

[esd]

XTree saved my digital life many-a-time back in the day!

[nuceomgz]

This used to be my go-to-tool, back in the day: https://www.tunesbro.com/mac-cleaner.html

I... loved that thing in a purely platonic way. Mostly purely.

+1! Saved tons of free spaces after scanning with this app.