BleachBit 1.10

Overview

Which program would you use if you wanted to clean your computer from junk files without messing with advanced settings or struggling to find crucial features? If you’re not sure, check out BleachBit; tt has everything you need to remove junk files and keep your computer in good condition by clearing cache, deleting history, temporary files as well as wiping application data and free space.

Installation

When you run the installer you’ll be presented with the installation wizard, which consists of only a few steps and has no difficult settings. At some point you’ll be asked which additional components you want to install; these include shortcuts, translations and also an option that launches the program on system startup. The setup package is clean from spyware, viruses and other types of malware, and it doesn’t install any additional 3^rd party software either.

Supported operating systems are Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, and Linux. We'll test the Windows edition here.

Interface

Most times, software with features for more experienced users have a relatively complicated interface, however BleachBit has a fairly simple GUI that is really easy to use. In the main window, apart from the menu bar and the toolbar (which has 2 buttons- Preview and Scan), there’s also a side bar and next to it an area in which the results are displayed. The sidebar has all the available areas of the system that can be cleaned by BleachBit, giving you the option to check the ones you want to clean and ignore the rest.

Pros

The areas of your computer that can be scanned by BleachBit cover virtually the whole system. In fact, the available items are grouped into categories depending on the applications installed in your computer; this means that the program recognizes installed software and integrates a cleaning scheme for the supported ones. Some of them are: Adobe Reader, Chromium, FileZilla, Mozilla Firefox, Flash, gFTP, GIMP, Google Chrome/Earth/Toolbar, Internet Explorer, Java, KDE, Microsoft Office, MySQL, OpenOffice, Opera, Paint, Phatch, Safari, TeamViewer, Thumbnails, Thunderbird, Skype, VLC media player, Winamp, Windows Defender, Windows Explorer, Windows Media Player and others. For each of those categories you can choose to clean particular items only.

After making your selections you can proceed to clean the computer, or perform a simulation of the cleaning process which will display a list with all the items that are going to be cleaned. If you’re not worried that important files might get deleted, just start the cleaning process directly.

The additional features of BleachBit let you shred files/folders as well as wipe free space.

Cons

No cons here, as the program works like it should without bugs.

Alternatives

An alternative to BleachBit, which has similar functionality, is CCleaner (free). But CCleaner has more features, like a registry editor and an uninstall tool. CCEnhancer is a small program that gives CCleaner expanded functionality and support for hundreds of programs, possibly more than BleachBit. Developer's note: CCEnhancer supports BleachBit, and recent versions of BleachBit incorporate the same ability to download the same winapp2.ini file. In other words, BleachBit can automatically download the same, large list of extra cleaners.

Another alternative is TuneUp Utilities (paid), which has significantly more tools than BleachBit and is for more general usage.

Conclusion

Very interesting program that serves as an excellent cleaning software. You'll regret not giving it a try!