(Guide/Review) SCleaner is an open source Disk Cleanup alternative

[mood]

SCleaner is an open source Disk Cleanup alternative

 

People with a small hard drive or constantly filled-to-the-brim drive will understand why it is important to get rid of trash files. I usually have one big game (modern ones are 100GB+) and a couple of smaller ones installed at the same time, and the rest of the space goes to my other storage needs: work, music, videos, pictures. So, I'm the kind of guy who fires up the Disk Cleanup tool in Windows every week or so.

 

 

Hey, that 400 - 500MB of storage I can recover means a lot to me, as I'm limited to a 500GB SSD. The culprits that usually eats away the biggest chunks of storage are the browsers, closely followed by Windows Updates.

 

Neither of those are avoidable, but these aren't the only ones that are using up your storage. SCleaner is an open source, upcoming disk cleanup tool that helps you delete temporary files with a single-click. It requires Administrator permissions to run, and you'll need to accept the UAC prompt every time you use it. The program has a very simple interface. Let me walk you through it.

SCleaner lists the Windows components in 3 sections: Explorer, System and Browser.

 

It can detect broken links, shortcuts, taskbar jumplists (right-click menu), search history, icon and thumbnail cache in Windows Explorer. In the System section, the program scans the Recycle Bin, Prefetch files, Temporary Folder, Error Logs, etc. As of now, the program does not support modern web browsers. It can clean the data from Internet Explorer, if for some reason you're still using it. The Menu section clears the clipboard and DNS Cache.

 

You may choose what the program should scan for, by marking the boxes next to each option. Hit the Scan button to analyze the amount of data that can be recovered, it's displayed in the bottom left corner of the window.

 

 

Happy with the results? Click the clean button to make SCleaner do its job.

 

 

This is what impressed me, the scan speed of the program. SCleaner was blazing fast to check for trash that can be deleted. It took about 1 second to detect the contents. Disk Cleanup has never been this fast for me, the progress bar in Windows' built-in utility sticks around for a good 10 seconds or so, before it takes me to the deletion options.

 

SCleaner is equally fast in deleting the data as well, though in its current form it doesn't do the job quite completely. I'm aware it's still in beta, so I'll cut it some slack.

 

There is no option to preview the content that you are about to delete. This may not be an issue for some users, but I'm sure that there are a few users who'd rather double-check the recycle bin's contents before hitting the Clean button. The obvious workaround for this, is to open the Recycle Bin using Explorer.

 

The next one isn't an issue but more of a feature I wish it had, SCleaner does not delete Files related to Windows Update and Windows Defender. Perhaps the developer is playing it safe by not letting the program delete system files, and I think that's a good idea in the case of the antivirus files. But, the update files tend to take up a lot of space, I think having an option to delete those without enabling it by default, and giving the user the choice whether to delete those would be a welcome addition.

 

I noticed a couple of bugs while testing the program, the "Icon and Thumbnail Cache" wasn't being deleted. It also incorrectly reported the size of some junk files, to be precise it was twice of what the actual amount was. Example: 23.2MB worth of Log Files were reported as 46.3MB. I was hoping this was fixed in the latest update, but it wasn't.

 

 

SCleaner requires .NET Core to run. The 32-bit executable had 4 detections on VirusTotal, while the 64-bit version had none. None of those detections are from a major antivirus provider, and from the names these seem to be based on low user score, well it's a new program, so I'll let you be the judge.

 

A more established alternative is BleachBit.

 

Landing Page https://github.com/TheShrewdGamer/SCleaner/

 

 

Source: SCleaner is an open source Disk Cleanup alternative

[pc71520]

10 hours ago, mood said:

A more established alternative is BleachBit.

CCleaner,too.

But Not an Open Source.

[FlyLowrie]

On 3/21/2021 at 10:40 PM, pc71520 said:

CCleaner,too.

But Not an Open Source.

You can try DISM++, which is open source.