Earlier this month, my laptop crashed during a Windows update. The reason wasn’t down to a bad patch or some driver conflict; it was because my system drive was dangerously low on space at the wrong time. I had to move about 35GB of files just to get some breathing room again.
That’s not the kind of scare you shrug off, and it’s part of the reason I’ve wasted money on cleanup tools before instead of using what’s already sitting on my PC for free. So once things settled, I started hunting for whatever else might be hiding on that drive. I checked what Windows itself considered safe to clean through Storage Sense before I even touched a third-party tool.
My C: drive was already running on fumes
25GB felt like a countdown, not breathing room
Two weeks after moving that 35GB off, I checked my storage and found only 25GB free on a 117GB SSD drive, with 91.3GB already used. My D: drive, by comparison, still had plenty of room, which tells you exactly why I keep dumping files over there out of habit at this point.
Of course, I can’t move everything. Between testing new tools to write about, sourcing and editing video content for my channel, gaming on the side, and running Windows Insider builds and updates, a lot of what’s on the system drive earns its place.
So I wasn’t looking for a magical way to clean up my entire drive. I just wanted to know if a few gigabytes were sitting there that I could safely get back.
Windows cleanup didn’t have much to offer
Only 639MB, once my own files were off the table
I started with Storage Sense’s cleanup recommendations since it’s already on Windows and I didn’t need to install anything else. It came back with 2.46GB of Temporary files, Downloads, the Recycle Bin, DirectX Shader Cache, Feedback Diagnostics, and Windows Error Report.
The issue is, 1.83GB of that number was Downloads, and Windows straight up told me not to touch it since they are my actual files. So, take that out, and the number Windows was actually calling safe to remove dropped to 639MB.
I know Windows’ cleanup settings can be conservative, but 639MB shocked me. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t anything, but it also isn’t much when you’ve just had a crash across a full drive, moved 35GB away, and ended up with just 25GB two weeks later. That gave me a reason to check out BleachBit.
BleachBit found a lot more
23,751 files were waiting to be cleared
I went through BleachBit’s options instead of ticking everything and hoping for the best. Deep scan stayed off the whole time, since it goes hunting for things like node_modules and developmental folders that Windows cleanup wasn’t considering in the first place.
Passwords, Downloads, Windows Update uninstallers, cookies, and other app data stayed unchecked everywhere too, obviously. I left all aggressive options because I wasn’t trying to turn storage cleanup into another problem.
BleachBit estimated through the ‘Preview’ option that it could recover 4.92GB of disk space across 23,751 files and 125 special operations. Most of that was browser cache files, which tracks with how much Chrome writes to the SSD without you noticing. That’s the kind of thing I was looking for. I don’t need to keep thousands of temporary browser files hanging around just because I use the browsers daily.
I actually got 3.3GB back
Not the 5.1GB on paper, but real space on my drive
I was comfortable with what BleachBit wanted to remove, so I clicked Clean. The final report said it recovered 5.1GB, deleted 23,466 files, and completed 125 special operations. It also reported 22 errors.
The errors were all Windows Defender-related “Access Denied” messages. BleachBit couldn’t touch those files because they were Windows Defender’s own scan history logs, and they were restricted. I actually felt reassured knowing there’s a limit to its access.
So, I checked my actual free space on my system drive, and it went from 25.2GB to 28.5GB. That’s 3.3GB of actual free space, not the 5.1GB BleachBit claimed on paper.
I checked for irregularities in everything I marked to clear their temp files, and restarted the PC to ensure nothing broke. It booted normally, and apps worked fine.
Worth having, not worth obsessing over
Maybe I don’t need this today, but I know I’ll need it soon
I’ll be honest: I can’t tell you the PC suddenly feels faster, lighter, or that the space gained makes a big difference. So, I’m probably the worst person to judge that right now. It almost feels like a placebo because I know I just freed up space.
You could look at 3.3GB on a 117GB drive and argue the whole thing wasn’t worth the effort. Moving big files to another drive probably does more for you than cleaning temporary files ever will. Well, that’s fair, but I’d already done that.
Once you’ve offloaded almost everything you can, tools like this become your only option, and every gigabyte counts more the tighter your space gets. I’ve also been curious about why Windows reserves RAM, since that’s also an issue I face alongside the storage issue.
For me, though, getting that extra 3.3GB without losing files or breaking anything is worth the effort, given how much I do on my PC and how quickly it fills up. But after seeing how much junk had accumulated, and the apps responsible, I know I’ll need it again soon.
So I’ll keep BleachBit around because the system drive is small and keeps getting too close to that uncomfortable limit, especially since Windows’ own cleanup has little to offer. Maybe it’s not a fix for your PC’s performance, but it gives you extra space to reclaim to avoid a sudden crash, as mine did.
