How does disc clean up works in Windows Vista?

How does disc clean up works in Windows Vista?

I think your cleanup does not work properly. If you sure that it shows 10 GB to be cleaned then before the confirmation to delete some of the check box are unmarked and so the disk is not properly cleaned.

So follow the prescribed procedure to clean up your drive:

To open Disk Cleanup by clicking on the Start button (left side below), point All Programs, click on Accessories, click on System Tools, then click on Disk Cleanup.

When the Disk Cleanup Options dialog box appears, select the partition of the hard drive which you want to clean up and click OK.

After that select the check boxes for the files you want to delete. (Specially compressed file box)

When you finish with the selecting the files you want to delete from the directory, click OK, and then click on Delete files to confirm the delete process.

When done check back the drive. It will be ok then.

How does disc clean up works in Windows Vista?

At first, I thought you are referring to a different application that has the same name but it turns out you are referring to Microsoft Windows’ own Disc Cleanup utility. The reason why only 4 GB data was cleaned out of the supposed 10 GB is probably because of the item called “Compress old files”.

When you start Disc Cleanup, it will scan the selected drive for files that can be cleaned like temporary files. Once it finished scanning, the window will show you the items that can be cleaned and their specific sizes. Each time you check an item, its size adds up to the total size you see next to “Total amount of disk space you gain”.

Normally, the item “Compress old files” is big. Checking this item doesn’t mean it will be removed from the system. This item refers to the old files on your system that you haven’t accessed in a while. It is not a kind of trash or temporary file that should be cleaned or deleted.

When you check this item, it means Disc Cleanup will compress those old files but no files will be deleted and the indicated size will be reduced to a smaller amount. That is probably why the 10 GB data you expected to be cleaned went down to only 4 GB because of the compressed files.