Your PC is probably carrying dead weight. Microsoft ships several cleanup tools inside Windows, but they do not all find the same junk—and one may be waiting for permission it never gets.
A scan-only test on the same 1TB C: drive found that nothing was cleaned or deleted. The drive had about 4 percent free space, yet Disk Cleanup offered to remove only 1.66GB, while Storage Sense produced the exact same figure.
Disk Cleanup is the oldest option, having shipped with every version of Windows since Windows 98. Storage Sense lives in Settings > System > Storage and is meant to empty the Recycle Bin, clear Downloads, and remove temporary files on a schedule.
Microsoft PC Manager is a separate free install that bundles a one-click “Boost,” a storage cleaner, and a few extras. It listed 26GB, but 15.5GB of that remained unticked because it included files that were not actually junk, so the headline number overstated the useful total.
The drive contained roughly 20GB of real junk. Disk Cleanup and Storage Sense found about 8 percent of it, while PC Manager covered about 90 percent—mostly because it spotted a 9.25GB NVIDIA shader cache, about 5GB of Chrome cache across four profiles, and 2.2GB of app crash dumps.
Both Windows tools missed those files. PC Manager also found caches left by Python and Node.js, although it left the NVIDIA cache, listed as 9GB, and Python cache, listed as 2.7GB, unticked so the user could decide.
Storage Sense Needs an Actual Schedule
Microsoft says Disk Cleanup overlaps with Storage Sense, and Storage Sense’s “Temporary files” list matches Disk Cleanup category for category. Storage Sense does more on top, but on the test drive it had cleaned “0 bytes” during the past month because its default trigger is only when disk space is low.
Windows apparently does not consider 3.9 percent free to be low. Items six months old were still sitting in the Recycle Bin, because apparently the bin has a stronger tenancy agreement than most renters.
The fix is a setting: open Settings > System > Storage > Storage Sense, then change Run Storage Sense from During low free disk space to every day, week, or month. Recycle Bin and Downloads thresholds can be set anywhere from 0 to 60 days.
PC Manager was the most thorough tool in the test. It preselected 8.9GB as safe to remove, mostly browser caches, crash dumps, and temporary files, and its Manage large files option found 238GB of files larger than 10MB.
It also nags about “Boost” and health checks, while some of the space it frees consists of cache that will grow back. Revo Uninstaller Free handles another part of the problem better: it runs a program’s own uninstaller, scans for leftover files, folders, and registry entries, then offers to remove them. CCleaner used to be the default recommendation. Skip it.
Games Leave Storage Behind
Modern games make this mess harder to spot. The original Tomb Raider needed about 100MB on PC, while Shadow of the Tomb Raider needs 40GB for the base game—a roughly 400-fold jump before patches, DLC, language packs, screenshots, and video clips join the party.
Every digital store lists a game’s required space, but patches and extra content sit on top of the base installation. Steam treats owned DLC as part of the game, and applying a patch can require far more free space than the download itself; language packs can also add duplicate dialogue files.
Fallout 76 launched on PS4 with a 45GB base install and a 54GB day-one patch. Ubisoft told The Division 2 players on Xbox One and PC to expect a 48GB to 52GB first update. Storage planning has become an exercise in reading the fine print after the fine print.
Steam removes a game’s installed files, but not everything the game created elsewhere. Saves and settings often remain in Documents, My Games, or AppData, while shader caches can stay in steamapps/shadercache inside a folder named for the game’s App ID.
Mods, crash dumps, Workshop content, empty game folders, and Steam screenshots can linger too. Steam tracks what it installed, not every file a game wrote to the drive, and it leaves saves alone so reinstalling does not erase progress.
Shader caches for games you no longer play are safe to remove because each game rebuilds its cache on the next launch. Windows’ DirectX Shader Cache can be cleared from Settings > System > Storage > Temporary files, while old Steam screenshots can be pruned from the userdata folder.
Steam also downloads pre-compiled shaders for hardware so games run smoothly and stores them per game in steamapps/shadercache. Valve says its pre-cache updates are designed to be small, but “small” is not the same as “cleaned up after uninstall.”
Astro Bot shows how captures grow quietly: it has 63 trophies, with 44 in the base game and 19 in its DLC. Sony’s PS5 capture settings can disable trophy videos or limit them to higher-grade trophies, and existing clips can be deleted from the Media Gallery.
Grand Theft Auto VI offers a less comfortable preview. The PS5 version is listed on the PlayStation Store at 210GB according to the PlayStation Game Size account, though Rockstar has not confirmed the figure; on a base PS5 with roughly 667GB usable, that would consume nearly a third of the drive.
Cheap GPUs May Benefit From Turning HAGS Off
Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling, or HAGS, takes a slice of VRAM that 6GB and 8GB graphics cards cannot spare with ease. HAGS is on by default on most PCs and is required for DLSS Frame Generation.
Microsoft introduced HAGS in a May 2020 Windows 10 update, comparing the change to “rebuilding the foundation of a house while still living in it” and saying users “should not notice any significant changes.” Nvidia added support for GTX 10-series cards and newer in driver 451.48 that June; AMD took until December 2023 to support it on the RX 7900, 7800, and 7700, while Intel supports it only on Arc B-series cards.
On an 8GB RTX 2070 Super, switching HAGS off freed nearly 950MB of graphics memory at a cost of three to five frames per second. Textures that stuttered in Cyberpunk 2077 and Stellar Blade loaded properly again.
The performance case is not universal. Tom’s Hardware measured changes from minus 0.73 percent to plus 0.06 percent on an RTX 2080 Ti and GTX 1050, while Gamers Nexus found no significant gains and a repeatable 2.4 percent drop in F1 2019 on a four-core Intel Core i3.
If your card has 12GB of VRAM or more, leave HAGS on, especially when using frame generation. On 6GB and 8GB cards, test games individually; switching it off can free nearly a gigabyte, but you lose DLSS Frame Generation. OBS also recommends turning it off when recording or streaming causes problems.
Steam’s September 2026 hardware survey found that 8GB cards still represent more than a quarter of GPUs, second only to 16GB cards, while 6GB cards account for 5.12 percent. Find the toggle at Settings > System > Display > Graphics > Advanced graphics settings, restart the system, and run simple benchmarks before and after.
Virtual Desktops Are Free Organization
Windows users also underuse virtual desktops, which segment one computer into specialized sections. They work in Windows 10 and both versions of Windows 11, and creating one takes either Task View, Windows + Tab followed by New desktop, or Windows + Ctrl + D.
Task View lets you rename desktops, choose unique wallpaper in Windows 11, reorder them with Move right or Move left, and drag windows between desktops. Switch with Task View or Windows + Ctrl + Left/Right arrow, then close a desktop with its top-right X or Windows + Ctrl + F4.
For cleaner separation, open Settings with Windows + I, select System, then Multitasking, and expand Desktops. For both taskbar and Alt+Tab behavior, choose Only on the desktop I’m using or On all desktops; limiting app switching to the current desktop creates the stronger boundary.
A free GitHub program called Windows Virtual Desktop Helper can show a desktop’s name when switching, display the current desktop in the system tray, and provide tray navigation or custom hotkeys. No hardware purchase required—a suspiciously efficient outcome.
Based on
- You might be neglecting the one thing that keeps your PC healthy — engadget.com
- Why Your Games Take Up Way More Drive Space Than Expected (Even When Uninstalled) — engadget.com
- The Simple Reason Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling Isn’t The Best Fit For Cheap GPUs — engadget.com
- Most Windows Users Are Seriously Underusing This Powerful Desktop Feature — engadget.com
