Wise Disk Cleaner Pro Gives Your PC a Thorough Cleaning

Obsessive about keeping every last piece of junk off your computer? Wise Disk Cleaner 4 Pro ($20, free demo) offers a robust and customizable feature set which should satisfy even the most compulsive deleters. This program searches your drives for file names and extensions of typically unnecessary files, and it suggests them for deletion. In addition to the built-in filters which target things such as temporary, index, and log files, users can create their own. This accommodates even the oddest of desires. For instance, if you think pictures aren't worth a thousand words, let alone a thousand bytes, just add "*.gif," "*.jpg," and "*image*" to the delete list.

After a few minutes of scanning your hard drive, Wise Disk Cleaner Pro displays a list of matching files. There is a great deal of flexibility for what to do with these. Files can be selected individually, or by group using parameters such as size, extension, and date of creation. Then you can choose to have the program delete them, send them to the Recycle Bin, or just move them to another folder. For particularly sensitive files, Wise Disk Cleaner Pro includes a scrubbing utility, which performs a much stronger delete. A normal delete doesn't actually remove data from your hard drive until the space is needed for something else. The scrubber overwrites the data with gibberish immediately, ensuring that no trace will remain. You can even export a list of deleted files to an Excel spreadsheet, thus confirming the program's destruction. This is particularly useful in conjunction with the auto run mode which allows you to set a schedule for periodic cleaning.

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It should be noted that there is a free version of the program available which is almost as full-featured. However, if you are truly zealous about keeping your hard drive clean, you'll miss the extra features such as the hard drive scrubber, the ability to select files by size and creation date, and the Excel exporter. But if you're outside this niche, Wise Disk Cleaner Pro is probably overkill; go for something simpler and free.

Note: This demo version is functionally the same as the Free version. To get the Pro features, you'll need to pay to upgrade to Pro.