Find Junk Files

Find Junk Files may not be an imaginative software name, but it’s an accurate one. This free tool finds junk files on your PC, mostly temporary files and folders. It scans for more than 100 file types, even obscure stuff like DOS and Windows 3.1 files, but you can choose what to scan and what to exclude. It’s easy to use, maybe too easy; while it doesn’t target anything dangerous like system files, it can find and remove logs, caches, settings, and other files and folders that, while not exactly “permanent,” you’d prefer to keep, if only for the sheer nuisance value of replacing them. Find Junk Files also includes a privacy scan.

Find Junk Files has a basic interface with a wizard mascot and three main buttons: Scan Computer Now, Privacy Protection, and Check for Updates. On the left side, buttons let you select files and folders to scan or exclude, start scans, and access the program’s settings, which include allowing multiple instances, playing sounds, and moving files to the Recycle Bin or deleting them directly.

We started a scan, which turned up a wide range of files. We were pleased to see nearly everything Find Junk Files found was in fact a junk file, mostly inside Temp folders. We could sort the list by size, type, attributes, date, name, and other headings. We could simply highlight a file, folder, or range of items to remove them, or we could click a button labeled Remove All Files. We don’t recommend doing this until you’re sure about what’s being removed. The scan also found some folders. Most were safe to delete, but there’s no harm in keeping an empty program file just because the program in question hasn’t used it yet. Weigh that against the chore of restoring a lost file in a corrupted program, and those few kilobytes hardly seem worth recovering.

Find Junk Files offers no access to a Help file from the interface, other than an active link from the developer’s logo. That’s a shame because it has considerable online resources, though some of the entries we clicked on were blank, suggesting a work in progress. Used carefully, Find Junk Files can help you clean out the junk that clogs up your system.