BleachBit Cleans the Junk from Windows and Linux

bleachbit

If you’re fed up with the accumulated cruft that’s built up on your machine, eating up valuable disk space and slowing it down, check out BleachBit, an open-source drive cleaning utility for Windows and Linux. It’s specifically designed to remove the junk that’s generated by over 70 different applications, including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari and Adobe Reader. It can also maintain your privacy by deleting cookies, shredding files to prevent recovery and wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications

It’s fast and easy to use, although as always with apps like that can delete potentially important files from your system, you should exercise caution when using it. After firing it up, you’re presented with a long list of file types that BleachBit can search for and delete in the left-hand pane, while the right-hand pane has fairly detailed descriptions of each file type, so you can see what it will be looking for. Helpfully, if you check the box of a file type that may not be such a good idea to delete (for example, checking the “Places” box under Firefox will delete all your bookmarks), the program issues a warning in a pop-up.

After you’ve checked all of the file types you want the app to search for, clicking the “Preview” button will perform the search and list all of the files in the right-hand pane; it will also give you a total of the number of files to be deleted and the space saved. If you’re happy, you can then hit the “Delete” button, which will go ahead and delete all of the files; when it’s done it lists the number of files deleted and the amount of drive space saved.

BleachBit is free and available to download for Windows and Linux here.

Which apps do you use for cleaning your computer?

(via One Thing Well)

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