Windows 11 Disk Cleaner with Built-in Utilities

One of the most frequently asked questions from s of all versions of Windows is how to clean the disk from unwanted files, especially when it comes to SSD drives. There are well-known third-party Windows disk cleaners, but you can also use existing system tools.

This tutorial details the utilities built into Windows 11 to clean the disk drive of temporary files and other junk files, allowing you to clean it automatically, among other things.

How to clean Windows 11 drive from junk files in Preferences

The first of the ways, or rather a whole set of disk cleanup tools in Windows 11 it is available in Preferences. Steps for use:

1. Go to Settings - System and open Memory.
2. In the window that opens, you will be able to see information about what is taking up disk space, with an option to delete unnecessary data.
3. Clicking on any of the categories - "Applications and Components", "Temporary Files", "Other" - displays information about what is in that category and is taking up space. In some categories, such as "Temporary files", it is possible to delete them. On this topic, it may be useful to read: How to find out what is taking up disk space.
4. Clicking on "Show more categories" will show more information about what exactly is taking up the space on the system disk: for example, you can estimate the space occupied by system files and reserved files, and clicking you can see what exactly is on that list.
5. The storage management section allows you to clean the disk. The main element here is memory control. When you go to the section you can enable and configure automatic disk cleaning and, if necessary, run it manually by clicking the "Run memory control now" button at the bottom of the memory control configuration window.
6. When you open the "Cleaning Tips" option, you will get information about temporary and unused files and programs, a list of large files on the disk, information about the space occupied in the recycle bin, and the s folder with an option to clean this data.

The Disk Cleanup and Storage Analysis features in Windows 11 Preferences are pretty basic, but they can come in handy, especially for novice s.

A major advantage over using third-party cleaning programs is that you are almost guaranteed nothing will go wrong with your system - deleting any data that you suggest cleaning is safe, except perhaps the s folder if you store something important in it.

Disk cleaning utility with the ability to remove individual files from the system that are not being used

As in previous versions of the system, the utility «Disk Cleanup»Separately built-in still works fine in Windows 11, and in many cases deletes more unnecessary data than the revised «Memory» section in settings.

The steps to use Disk Cleanup will be as follows:

1. Right-click the Start button and select Run or press the keys Win + R on the keyboard.
2. I went into cleanmgr in the Run dialog box and press Enter.
3. When you are prompted to select a drive, select the drive you want to erase.
4. A basic list of files that are not needed and can be deleted will appear, they usually do not take up much disk space.
5. If you press the "Erase files from system" button, the scan will be repeated, but the list of files that can be erased and the amount of data will be greater.
6. To clean the disk of unnecessary files, check the necessary items, click OK, and wait until the removal of the files is complete (this can take a long time on individual systems).

It may be interesting to run this utility in Advanced Mode, which also works in Windows 11, more details: Run the Disk Cleanup Utility in Advanced Mode.

Like the memory monitoring feature, Windows 11's built-in Disk Cleanup tool is secure and you don't have to worry about removing critical data from your system. Want to free up a few more gigabytes of space on your C drive? - I recommend that you read the article How to delete the DriverStoreFileRepository folder in System32.