19 Tools to Get the Junk Off Your PC

Hard-Disk Cleanup

Like an overstuffed closet, your hard disk likely has many files you no longer need. These utilities can help you find and delete them.

Duplicate Music Files Finder

Got a disk full of MP3s or other music files? If so, there's a good chance you've got duplicates, hogging up hard disk space, and junking up your media library. Finding duplicates can be an exceedingly time-consuming task, because you may have the same music file, but with different names, multiple times. That means in order to find duplicates you'll have to play every track, remember what you played, and then delete duplicates.

This free, simple program finds duplicates for you, fast, and lets you delete them. It doesn't just search for files names. It also compares file sizes, does CRC checks, and even looks at ID3 (MP3 metadata) tags to help track down duplicates.

Download Duplicate Music Files Finder.

Easy Duplicate Finder

Use your PC long enough, and it will get littered with duplicate files of all kinds: graphics files, .doc files, media files, .dll files--you'll be surprised at how many duplicates you have. They not only take away precious hard disk space, they also make it hard to find the files you want.

This simple freebie will find duplicate files, then let you delete the ones you don't want. Point it at your hard disk or selected folders, and it goes to work. It then gives you a full report, and lets you clean them en masse, or just selected ones. There's some nice intelligence built in as well. It tells you how much disk space duplicate files take up, for example, and it lets you protect system files so that you don't accidentally delete any important ones your PC needs to run properly.

Download Easy Duplicate File Finder.

Wise Disk Cleaner

Your PC likely has all kinds of unnecessary files, such as temporary ones that applications should have deleted after they were no longer needed, plus various log files, index files, and old backup files. The amount of space these junk files take up can really add up.

The Wise Disk Cleaner looks for it all, and then deletes what you tell it to. You can choose to have the files permanently deleted, or to have them moved first to the Recycle Bin. And you can have the program do the cleanup automatically, or you can do it manually. You'll be amazed at how much hard disk space this program can gain for you. On my laptop, for example, it found 872MB of junk. I needed none of it, so right there I got back that amount of disk space.

Download Wise Disk Cleaner.