60 8 – 21 June 2022 • Issue 633
(and stop using
CCleaner)
Clean your PC with
BleachBit
BleachBit is our new favourite
PC-cleaning software, but which
of its powerful tools do you
need to use? Jonathan Parkyn
explains basic, moderate and
advanced cleaning strategies
We removed data and recovered 2.76GB that
Windows Storage Sense couldn’tT
here was a time when the
release of a new version of
CCleaner would have got us
quite excited. But version 6.0 of
the program (www.snipca.com/41984)
doesn’t have us reaching for the
‘Download’ button. As we explained in
Issue 627’s Cover Feature (‘Stop Using
Rubbish Software’, page 51), the free
BleachBit (www.bleachbit.org) has
supplanted Piriform’s once-mighty
program as our current system-cleaning
tool of choice. It’s packed with powerful
features for every type of user, whether
you want to free up space by clearing out
junk files, or dive deeper to clean your
entire system and protect your privacy.
However, with so many options it’s not
easy to know which ones you need to
select to perform the kind of clean that’s
suitable for you. Here, we split your
options into three tiers: basic, moderate
and advanced.
But first, a note on BleachBit’s interface,
which is split into two panes. On the left,
you’ll see a selection of categories and
programs – clicking the arrow next to
each one will reveal or hide their selection
of cleaning tools. Clicking on the category
heading itself will show a description of
each tool in the right-hand pane.
Tick the box next to any of the cleaning
tools and you may be shown a warning if
it’s likely to have any significant effect on
your system. Click the Preview button to
see how much hard-drive space your
selected options will free up. Clicking theClean button will run all the cleaning
tools you’ve selected.BASIC CLEANING
Remove Windows junk
Windows has its own built-in junk
cleaner (Storage Sense), but BleachBit’s
tools (under the System heading,^1 in our
screenshot below) are much more
forensic, letting you remove digital debris
from the deepest recesses of the
operating system. On our test PC, for
example, BleachBit erased a further
2.76GB of Windows junk that Storage
Sense couldn’t remove^2.
Some of the System options are
self-explanatory: ‘Clipboard’ purges the
clipboard, ‘Recycle bin’ empties your
trash, and so on. ‘Logs’ deletes old system
logs – these won’t take up huge amounts
of space (about 14MB in our case) but can
be worth erasing if you’re concerned
about privacy, as they contain informationabout your system and activity. The same
goes for ‘Memory dump’, which shows
the contents of your RAM when your PC
crashes, and could contain sensitive info.
‘MUICache’ refers to your computer’s
list of previously run programs – cleaning
this isn’t essential and won’t regain much
space, but can be a good way to prevent
others from seeing what you’ve been
doing. Similarly, running the ‘Prefetch’
tool will erase the contents of a Windows
cache file that makes loading frequently
used programs and files faster. Cleaning
this may actually slow down some
functions, so only select this if you want
to delete this information for privacy
reasons.
‘Custom’ lets you specify a file or folder
that you want to clean – ignore this
unless you have a specific reason to use it.
We’ll be looking at the ‘Free disk space’
option later. The other option worth
ticking is ‘Update uninstallers’. This
cleans out the uninstaller files for
Windows Updates. These can take up a
fair amount of space (895MB in our case)
and it’s unlikely you’ll ever need them.Make BleachBit easier to see
For reasons known only to its developers,
BleachBit defaults to a dark interface with
white text on a dark-grey background,
which can make it somewhat hard to
read. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to
fix this. Click the BleachBit menu icon
(in the top-left corner) then select
Preferences. In the window that opens,1
2