How to Delete Useless Files on Windows 10?

What are Windows junk files?

Honestly, all useless file on your PC can be called junk files. Junk files are files that stay on your computer after you have completed a task. When Windows or software has to generate temporary files while performing a job, it won't erase the outdated files and the temporary files it creates. Your computer gradually accumulates junk files in the form of temporary files, log files, downloaded files, and all other unwanted/unnecessary Windows registry entries.

▶ The common useless files are:
Temp files
Installer files
Thumbnails
Cache files
…

And your system will generate large files like hibernation files and RAM cache, etc. All these useless files will stay on your disk, since your PC won’t automatically clear them, your disk will be full of useless files, and the computer will slow down. Therefore, regularly deleting useless files are quite necessary.

How to delete useless files on Windows 10 via OS built-in tools

Some Windows users don’t know how to remove useless files from computers, in this part, we’ll show you clean junk files via Windows built-in clean tools.

▶ Opt. 1. Disk Cleanup

Disk Cleanup is to assist users in deleting unwanted files on the target disc such as part of temporary files, thumbnails, delivery optimization Files, and so on.

Step 1. Type "disk cleanup" in the search bar and press "Enter".

Step 2. Select the target drive and click “OK”.

Step 3. Then, tick the files you don't need and click "OK" to confirm the action.

You can continue to clean up system files, but please be careful to delete system files.

▶ Opt. 2. Storage Sense

Storage Sense is a new feature in Windows 10 that may automatically free up space by deleting things you no longer require. And you can set a schedule to clean temp files.

Step 1. Open Windows Settings first.

Step 2. Then, click on “System” on the main interface.

Step 3. Select the “Storage” option and turn the “Storage Sense” button “On”.

Step 4. You can also set the Storage Sense according to your preferences on the “Configure Storage Sense or run it now” page.

Step 5. If you need to delete files manually, you can click "Temporary files". Check the types of files you want to delete, and click "Remove files".

▶ Opt. 3. File Explorer

Disk Cleanup can’t clear all temp files, so you’ll need to delete temp files manually.

Step 1. Press Windows + R to open Run window, input %temp% and click OK to open the Temp folders. Then, delete all the temporary files and folders in it.

▶ Opt. 4. Command Prompt

You can use Command Prompt to clean hibernation files whose size most likely has several gigabytes or more in size, depending on the capacity of your disk. That instance, if you have 8GB of RAM, the hiberfil.sys file will consume 8GB of hard drive space; if you have 20GB of RAM, the hiberfil.sys file may consume 20GB of hard drive space.

Step 1. Go to the Start menu, type "cmd" right-click on the results Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.

Step 2. Then type "powercfg.exe / hibernate off" and press Enter.

And you need to clean your recycle bin from time to time because its path is in your system drive.

Clean all useless files via an all-around tool

As can be seen from the preceding, cleaning the disk is in order to keep your PC in excellent working order. Windows has different tools for cleaning different junk files, so you’ll need to open different tools to clear your computer. Is there an app that can clean all kinds of junk files on the disk? Here, we recommend you AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, a disk and partition manager for Windows 11/10/8/8.1/7/XP users to manage their devices securely and conveniently.

The “PC Cleaner” function of this tool can scan your disks and system to find all useless files on your computer, and then only a click you can remove them all. And if you upgrade to the Professional Edition, you can delete large files and useless system files after the scan, so you don’t need to worry about deleting important system files by mistake.

Step 1. Download and open AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, and click "Free up" and "PC Cleaner" in turn.

Step 2. Click "Start Scan" in the new pop-up window to scan your computer for unwanted files.

Step 3. After starting the scan, please wait for a while until the progress bar is loaded.

Step 4. Unneeded data will be automatically selected, you can directly click "Clean All" to delete them. If you still have other unnecessary files, you can tick the boxes of the corresponding files.

Step 5. When you see a correct symbol displayed in the interface, you can click "Back" to leave the function.

Final lines

This is how to delete useless files on Windows 10. You can use different Windows built-in tools to clean all junk files, and you can choose an all-around Windows cleaner—AOMEI Partition Assistant to easily and quickly remove all unnecessary files from your PC. After that, you can employ this professional tool to allocate free space from another drive to extend the C drive, move installed programs to release more available space, or clone your disk to a new disk to upgrade your hard disk without reinstalling, etc.

What’s more, you can choose the Server Edition of this program to manage your Server computer. It supports Windows Server 2025/2022/2019/2016/2012(R2)/2008(R2)/2003.