Review: BleachBit offers free, comprehensive disk cleaning and privacy protection - welchnotheeptist

At a Glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Free
Extensible
Lightweight

Cons

Utilitarian interface
Some point descriptions are not informative

Our Finding of fact

Home users might make up better off with an established alternative like CCleaner, only if you're a business user looking at to keep, BleachBit is an excellent choice

In that respect are so many organization cleaners come out of the closet there, you could pack a Kickoff screen with them. They're not entirely equally good, though, and some are have restrictions for business use. CCleaner and PC Decrapifier are among the best, simply they are not completely free to use in a professional setting. Businesses wishing to use either of these have to ante up. If you're a business user looking for a genuinely sovereign system cleaner, one interesting selection is ASCII text file, cross-platform BleachBit.

BleachBit's text-heavy interface is suited for users who know what they're doing.

BleachBit doesn't let much in the way of a flashy interface. There's a list of items running down the left side of the window, subdivided into categories such as Google Chrome, Scud, Microsoft Office, and then on. There's also a System category for more general cleanups, and a Deep Rake one for tracking down trash files strewn all over the disk (much as .DS_Store and thumbs.db files).

Pick a category, and a quick explanation appears about each of its sub-items. Explanations are ordinarily rattling short and assume anterior noesis, though For example, under Firefox, you can opt to moral unconscious something called DOM Storage. If you're not sure what that is, the text informs you that this means it will "Delete HTML5 cookies." If you know what that means, great. If not, you'll have to start searching the Web for answers.

BleachBit is impertinent plenty to know that any operations are going to be more meter-consuming than others. For example, when you halt the box to take Temporary Files during a Deep CAT scan, it pops aweigh an alert tattle you that this is going to be a long-playing cognitive process. Early alerts exist too: Check the box for deleting Musical accompaniment files, and BleachBit will quick you to inspect the Preview composition for some files you do want to hold on.

BleachBit does include single-line descriptions of what each item does, simply some of these are laconic.

Formerly you've distinct what you want to clean out, it's time to click the Preview release. This executes a dry run of the options you've checked, outputting a log of plotted operations. If this sounds dry and technical, that's because it is: the output is just a long-dated, long, text dump glutted of inscrutable paths for jury-rigged files and cookies, and different information. At the terminate of the report there's a more human-readable summary, lease you lie with how much disk distance would be recovered away the operation, how many files would personify deleted, and how many "special trading operations" would be performed. Particular operations include things like securely wiping free record space.

The log is only marginally useful. Not only is it touchy to read, merely if you spot an operation you wish to turf out (for example, a file you don't want deleted after all), there International Relations and Security Network't so much you can do about information technology. You canful't exclude it: all you arse do is to cancel the whole mathematical process.

Another problem with the log is that it doesn't make it clear which disc drives are affected. For example, when I ran BleachBit, IT cleansed out an impressive 18.5GB of files. Merely it didn't clarify whether that was on my relatively small SSD, or my roomy 2TB hard drive. It in all likelihood cleaned some from some, but the report card only expressed a gross without breaking it down per drive.

BleachBit can emancipated up lots of platter space, but neglects to state you which drives now have more breathing room.

BleachBit feels like a square, nobelium-nonsense utility for users who know what they're doing. Being free, open-source, and cross-platform are great advantages, especially in an enterprise environment. If you're just a home exploiter looking a simpleton way to clear out your computer, BleachBit doesn't beat CCleaner. But for an office, or a home user who likes to hold back their computers clean, BleachBit makes for a lean solution.

Note: The Download button on the Mathematical product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the fashionable version of the software.