Ah! Another free software program and what a little gem this one is. Cleanup Assistant searches your hard drive to find duplicate files, unused junk files, and empty folders and removes them to free up space on your hard drive and keeps it from slowing down. The cleaner your hard drive, the better your computer operates. This is not a complex software suite by any stretch, but it serves it’s purpose well.

Installation.
The program downloaded to my laptop and installed (runs on Windows XP and Vista) in about a minute; That’s including all the clicks to tell COMODO Firewall to allow the install. As you can see, the user interface is very clean and simple to navigate. The first feature is the Trash Cleaner which removes temporary and junk files and shreds your computer usage history as an added security feature. After clicking this option, I was prompted to update the “Trash Definitions”, which took about a second. I then clicked on Calculate Trash Size and Disk Cleanup 1.2 completed the scan in a few seconds giving me these results:

CLEANUP SCAN SUMMARY:

Recycle Bin size: 0 b
Internet browsing: 16.69 MB
Windows: 40.52 MB
Instant Messaging and Internet Chat: 0 b
Multimedia: 59.57 KB
Office applications: 0 b
Graphics tools: 0 b
Torrent Clients: 0 b
Archiving applications: 0 b
CD/DVD Burning applications: 0 b
Games: 0 b
Other Applications: 0 b
Total estimated cleanup size: 57.26 MB

File cleanup.
Not a whole lot of trash, but this is on a system where I run CCleaner daily. You also get the option to view the actual files that will be removed. After closing all other applications, the cleanup process completed in a matter of seconds. I was bit confused as it appeared I was stuck at the Trash Cleanup window and could not get back to the main interface. It turns out Cleanup Assistant opens a new windows for each function. Of course, I’m easily confused anyway.

I then proceeded to Find Large folders which simply shows you any exceptionally large folders residing on you system. Only one, the Adobe folder, was listed. To my surprise, I had no empty folders or duplicate files.

Security features.
Cleanup Assistant 1.2 has the additional capability to shred specific files or entire folders. You can select the number of times you want the files to be overwritten up to 35 overwrites. This makes the files unrecoverable by someone who may want to take a look at your deleted files. Drive Wiper is another great feature of this software. This will permanently erase any deleted files residing in the unused space on your hard drive, making them unrecoverable. I guess I won’t be needing anymore.

Cleanup Assistant is very fast and seems to be very light on system resources. I have no doubt, I’ll be using this one on a very regular basis.