Download Disk Cleanup Windows 8.1 PORTABLE
Hedy Paino
Disk Cleanup is designed to target files that are safe to delete and won't harm your system. However, it's always a good practice to review the selected file types before confirming the cleanup to ensure you don't inadvertently delete something important.
I have a laptop with Windows 11 Pro 21H2, upgraded from Windows 10 Pro. For a couple of weeks now disk cleanup does not work at all. Never had a problem before. The non-functioning seems to have started after I installed July updates at the end of July.
Using the instructions for removing the temp files manually, I was able to remove the temp files. But the others remained , especially the 2.28GB windows update cleanup files, which are the primary ones I wanted to clean up.
I prefer DISM++ over all those previously mentioned but @geekdom has supplied the first two steps to recovery in using the proprietory MSFT disk cleaner.
@OP you could also lookup sageset/sagerun switches for Disk Cleaner which opens up a lot more options to remove excess ?
Hi, we are starting to work with intune in my company to apply configurations on low cost PCs. One of the issues we are trying to solve is low disk space after windows update. As per our users profiles, we can not depend on them to manually run cleanups so we need an automatic solution(The following tests have been run on a laptop with windows 10.0.18363.997).
According to the windows interface (I saw it in a windows dialog, can't remember where) the old updates are deleted after 10 days, but i tried skipping 10 days manually and the files are still there.
Disk Cleanup searches your disk and then shows you temporary files, Internet cache files, and unnecessary program files that you can safely delete. You can direct Disk Cleanup to delete some or all of those files. This tool guides you through a series of tasks and systematic procedures to help you get back to work quickly.
In Windows 7, Vista, and XP, DiskCleanup frees disk space by cleaning areas that gather unneededfiles. Using Disk Cleanup regularly, along with ScanDisk,DEFRAG, and up-to-date virus patterns, will help keep yourcomputer running smoothly.
Disk Clean-up (cleanmgr.exe) is a computer maintenance utility included in Microsoft Windows designed to free up disk space on a computer's hard drive. It was introduced in Windows 98, but has now been deprecated and replaced with a modern version in the Settings app, although it still exists as a legacy tool in Windows.
The utility searches files that are no longer of any use, and then removes the selected unnecessary files. There are a number of different file categories that Disk Clean-up targets when performing the initial disk analysis:
Aside from removing unnecessary files, users also have the option of compressing files that have not been accessed over a set period of time. This option provides a systematic compression scheme. Infrequently accessed files are compressed to free up disk space while leaving the frequently used files uncompressed for faster read/write access times. If after file compression, a user wishes to access a compressed file, the access times may be increased and vary from system to system.
To get "Disk Cleanup" to show up as a button on a disk drive's Properties dialog box, you have to change the registry to add a new key and "Expandable String Value". Create a new .reg text file and paste in the following:
You cannot complete the task to cleanup disks, in computers with the Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2 operating systems, using the System Tools feature in Endpoint Central. The error message that you see on the screen is, 'Disk cleanup failed'.
The Disk Cleanup button is part of the Desktop Experience feature. The Disk Cleanup executable file cleanmgr.exe and the associated Disk Cleanup button are not available in computers with the operating systems Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, by default. In order to enable the Disk Cleanup button in a disk's Properties page, you are required to install the Desktop Experience feature.
While you can search for temporary files yourself and delete them manually, you save time by using the Windows disk cleanup tool. You can search your entire hard disk for specific files within a matter of seconds with the disk cleanup utility. The tool also gives you greater control over which files to delete and those to keep. When outdated application files are removed from your system, it runs more smoothly and has fewer crashes.
On pretty much every system I've tried,cleanmgr just hangs the first time and never completes. I've tried cleanmgr both with a /sageset /sagerun setup, or just with /verylowdisk. I've used the secondary wait command, or gone without it. And when I do it as a .PS1, Cleanmgr, even with -WindowStyle Hidden still shows a pop-up, which at some point disappears, but the script stays stuck, and sits there for an hour or more (test systems have SSDs, so not slow), whereupon I give up. When I do it through the RMM tool, it either hangs just like the .PS1, or once in awhile I get an output of "Object reference not set to an instance of an object", or another error.On some systems, if I end the script, it will then run on successive tries. But I can't get it to go consistently. So frustrating.
EDIT: And the answer is it only works with -PassThru. Otherwise, it's a complete tossup. So I've added that. I'm concerned it doesn't finish before the next part of my script however (and adding "-Wait" brings the issue back), so I added "Start-Sleep -Seconds 300" to ensure I give everything time before going on to calculate how much disk space was freed during the cleanup.
Running CleanMgr.exe in a powershell script or by itself seems to work fine as long as you run it locally with an account that has local admin rights. But try running it remotely via any remote management tool or remote scripting command (Invoke-Command) and it does not run. You might see the process running on the remote system but it doesn't seem to cleanup anything and the process never ends. I would be interested if anyone has been able to get cleanmgr.exe to run remotely without any user interaction. E.G. ConfigMgr Right Click Tools, ConfigMgr App or PKG, Task Scheduler.
While this is a pretty simplified description of the WinSxS folder, the general idea I want to convey here is that the WinSxS folder can grow so large that it takes up a good chunk of hard disk space. The problem gets compounded by the fact that the WinSxS folder is used to store so many files. This means that old files as well as files that are no longer necessary can still be taking up hard disk space.
For instance, Figure A shows the WinSxS folder properties dialog on a system that began as a Windows 7 system, which was upgraded to Windows 8.x and again to Windows 10. As you can see, the WinSxS folder on this system contains 60,209 files and takes up a grand total of 6.73 GB of hard disk space.
I have VMWare 3.1.3 using it to run Windows XP on a Summer 2009 iMac with 8GB of RAM and 1TB of disk (partitioned). I'm in a cycle where after a couple weeks VMWare says it needs more disk space. The space for Windows XP is on a virtual disk partion and it's size is about 194 GB. The local C drive for Windows XP is showing about the same amount of space or 134GB of free space and 60 of used space. So it appears I need to reduce the disk size for the C drive so that I can make everything fit on the 194GB partition.
When I go to the Settings panel and click on HDD there is a message at the top saying "These settings cannot be changed while disk cleanup is recommended. To make these changes, first click the Clean Up Disk button." When I do this the pop up panel warns about cleanup taking a long time. I click the Clean Up button and it pops up with "Cleaning deleted files ..." and then quickly stops with no messages and the same warning message at the top of the HDD panel.
Under Windows I have run Disk Defrag after getting rid of several files to free up space on the C drive. The Disk Defrag panel shows files (used space) spread all across the disk. And I have used Virtual Machine Snapshots to remove all snap shots. So now no snapshots show under the Snapshot window.
I've been reading through the forums and following the documentation but nothing seems work. And I've become confused and overwhelmed with information. I've been working on this since last week and I'm just spinning my wheels with little to show for the time and effort. When I started having the problem, the VMWare file holding Windows XP was about 190GB and now its about 225GB. Evertime when I got a little more space I could start using VMWare/Windows XP but after a few hours of light usage, bang I'm back getting the need more disk spacemessage out of VMWare. I've been able to free up a little disk space but I've run out of that option so I'm stuck. I sure wish I could find some help! A bummer.
It is hard to know why your WinXP VM is so large, but generally, 'growable' or 'sparse' disks start at a certain size (on your Mac HD). Windows 'guest' OS would see a larger size, which is the maximum size.
I checked the activity monitor and found VM-Ware running a small percent of the time and vmware-vmx in red and showing "not responding". At that point I killed vmware-vmx and then VM-Ware and the HD Panel immediately ended. The HD panel is still pointing to "file:///Volumes/Windows%20XP/Windows%20XP%20Professional.vmwarevm/Windows%20XP%20Professional-000005.vmdk" with the message at the top of the panel saying "These settings can not be changed while disk cleanup is recommended. To make these changes, first click the Clean Up Disk Button." When I click on the "Clean Up disk" button it starts up with the same progress bar saying "Cleaning up deleted files" but stops within a few seconds with no messages. As far as I can tell nothing has changed and I get the same response when clicking on the "Clean Up Disk" button each time. When I check for snapshots Panel it shows there are no snapshots.
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