Clean Windows Hdd

Clean Windows HDD

Find the space, name the producer of every large folder, then reclaim only what regenerates or leaked. The human decides on everything else.

Commands below are PowerShell. From Git Bash, run them as powershell.exe -NoProfile -Command "...". Folders under C:\Windows, C:\ProgramData and the other users' profiles need an elevated shell; the profile folder does not.

1. Measure

Get-Volume | Where-Object DriveLetter | Select-Object DriveLetter, FileSystemLabel,
  @{n='UsedGB';e={[math]::Round(($_.Size-$_.SizeRemaining)/1GB)}},
  @{n='FreeGB';e={[math]::Round($_.SizeRemaining/1GB)}}

Then size the profile one level down. A recursive walk of the profile runs for minutes: run it in the background with a long timeout and keep going.

Get-ChildItem -Force -Directory $HOME | ForEach-Object {
  $sum = (Get-ChildItem $_.FullName -Recurse -Force -File -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Measure-Object Length -Sum).Sum
  [pscustomobject]@{ GB = [math]::Round($sum/1GB,1); Path = $_.FullName }
} | Sort-Object GB -Descending | Select-Object -First 25

Run the same walk over C:\ProgramData, C:\Windows (elevated), and $env:LOCALAPPDATA — three quarters of a developer's space hides under AppData\Local, and the first walk reports it as one line.

2. Attribute

Drill into each folder above 1 GB until it is attributed: the tool, app, or script that writes it is named, and the folder falls in one class:

• Regenerable — a cache the producer rebuilds on demand (package caches, build outputs, browser caches, emulator images, update downloads).
• Leak — output the producer should have removed and did not (a temp dir of a killed process, dumps of a runaway loop, a virtual disk that grew and never shrank). A leak has a producer to patch, not only a folder to delete.
• Data — the human's files and system state (documents, games, VM images, hibernation file, restore points). Report it, leave it.

Check OFFENDERS.md first: it holds the producers already met, their classes, their reclaim commands, and the fix that stops each leak. A folder the catalog lacks gets attributed by hand: recent file dates, Get-Process for a running producer, a search of the user's repos for the tool name.

Three things mislead here. A WSL or Docker .vhdx is a leak on the Windows side even when the Linux side is tidy: the file only grows, and shrinking it is its own step in clean-wsl. C:\Windows\Installer and C:\ProgramData\Package Cache look like caches and are not: hand-deleting them breaks every later uninstall and repair. And a producer that is still running keeps its temp folder live: Get-Process <name> before touching it, and stop or finish the producer first.

Done when every folder above 1 GB carries a producer and a class.

3. Report

Print one table: folder, size, producer, class, planned action. Lead with the total the regenerable and leak rows add up to. Then stop and wait for the user's go-ahead: Remove-Item bypasses the Recycle Bin.

4. Reclaim

On the go-ahead, in this order:

1. Delete the leaks and patch each producer so it stops leaking (the catalog names the flag or setting).
2. Run each regenerable cache's own clean command from the catalog; use Remove-Item -Recurse -Force only for a cache with no command.
3. Re-read Get-Volume and report before and after, plus every producer patched.

A new producer met on the way goes into OFFENDERS.md in the same pass, so the next run starts from it.