First Look at the Windows disk cleaner Clean Space

Clean Space is a free (and professional) software program for Microsoft's Windows operating system to remove temporary storage from the computer's hard disks.

The application works similarly to other PC cleaners such as CCleaner, Bleachbit, or the built-in disk cleanup tool of the Windows operating system. These programs are designed to free up disk space but not to improve system performance (except for a few edge cases if disk space is really low).

Clean Space comes with a set of locations and programs that it supports out of the box; it will run a scan of the system to detect temporary storage that can be removed from the system to free up disk space.

Clean Space is compatible with all client versions of the Windows operating system starting with Windows XP. I tested the program on a system running Windows 10 version 1809. The program requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 or higher.

Clean Space first look

The program installed fine on the test system; it tried to connect to company servers to check for updates but does not require registration.

Clean Space starts the scan of the system right on start. It detects if a program is running and suggests to close it as it may not be able to access certain files or folders while the program runs. You can enable auto-close to have it closed automatically in the future or skip it instead.

The scan is just a dry run as nothing will get deleted. Clean Space computes the total number of bytes that you can free up if you run the clean-up operation right away.

Note: anything that is tagged with Pro is reserved and not available in the free version.

I suggest you click on Settings first to make a few modifications before you run any operations.

The settings of the application list several interesting features. You can have it create system restore points automatically before clean-up operations, enable the secure deletion feature to prevent file recovery using recovery software, add cookies to the "keep" listing to prevent them from being deleted, or blacklist certain programs to prevent them from being scanned by the application.

A click on details in the main interface displays the scanned programs and locations, and the storage space that you can free for each.

The list is quite long and divides entries into groups. The Windows 10 entry alone has a good 30 or so entries, browsers have more than 10 entries, and even CCleaner is on that list.

Tip: click on any listing in the sidebar to jump straight to it.

A click on the trashcan icon next to an entry deletes that particular item only, e.g. the list of recently used elements in Windows, Firefox program crash reports, or Chrome's media cache. You may delete all entries of the selected program or location at once as well with a click on the attached link. There is also an option to recalculate that particular program or location.

Closing Words

Clean Space is a well designed system cleaner for Windows that supports a good range of programs and Windows locations and features. The scan on program start takes a few seconds to complete but that is to be expected considering that it scans quite a few locations on the system.

The details page has a messy feel to it; an option to search results, just display the main groups by default, or sort them based on storage size could be useful to bring some order into the page. The program lacks options to extend the cleaning by adding custom locations.

All in all, Clean Space is a well designed program for Windows that works well as an alternative to established system cleaners for the operating system.

Now You: do you use system cleaners?

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