Stop trusting cleanup tools with your PC storage—here's what goes wrong

Stop trusting cleanup tools with your PC storage—here's what goes wrong Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek By  Monica J. White Published Jun 16, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT Monica J. White is a journalist with over a decade of experience in covering technology. She built her first PC nearly 20 years ago, and she has since built and tested dozens of PCs. PC hardware is her main beat, and graphics cards and the GPU market at large are her main area of interest, but she has written thousands of articles covering everything related to PCs, laptops, handhelds, and peripherals. From GPUs and CPUs to headsets and software, Monica's always willing to geek out over all things related to computing. Outside of her work with How-To Geek , Monica contributes to TechRadar , PC Gamer , Tom's Guide , Laptop Mag , SlashGear , Whop , and Digital Trends , among others. Her ultimate goal is to make PC gaming and computing approachable and fun to any audience. Monica spends a lot of time elbow-deep in her PC case, as she's always making upgrades, testing something, or plotting out her next build. She's the go-to tech support person in her immediate circle, so she's never out of things to do. Whenever she has spare time, you'll find her gaming until the early hours and hanging out with her dog. Sign in to your How-To Geek account Add Us On follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread 1 Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap Freeing up space on a PC sounds easy enough to do. Maybe you'll delete some old files, or maybe you'll bring an old drive back to life and let it deal with all the clutter while your main SSD deals with the important stuff. Both of those options are good, but they're not exactly the first thing people tend to go for; at least not always. The problem lies with cleanup tools. They're so easy to use: click something, get some gigabytes back, you're d