Reclaim your Disk Space with DiskMax

Sometime back I had reviewed an instant search tool from Koshi Jon called neoSearch. This time I will take a look at another one of his application – DiskMax.

DiskMax is basically a junk file cleaner that gets rid of unneccesary files and folders lying around on your disk. It sports a very simplistic and clean interface. It has three modes – Quick, Standard and Detailed. Unlike most other software which provides a list of items to be cleaned before/after scan, Diskmax directly starts scanning and keeps asking for user choices where ever it deems necessary. While I prefer the traditional approach as that gives me better control and lets me know exactly what is going on, this simplified approach would definitely be appreciated by most standard users.

Here are some of the things DiskMax does :

Automates emptying your recycle bin
Cleans up installation remnants, and debugging information.
Cleans up every user’s History, Temp, Temporary Internet Files, Cookies (if specified), Recently opened documents list, explorer thumbnail cache and windows error reporting logs.
Clears out Windows cache, unused legacy cursors (on Vista, if specified), debugging info, internet logs, help center caches, repair information, DLL caches, Logs, temporary files and windows update roll-back files.
Cleans up after Vista SP1 install (if specified).
Removes registry entries for multiple Most Recently Used lists.
Clears out Windows Vista event logs (no other application out there does this).
Deep scans your hard-disk to remove all files of type log, old, prv, chk, swp, bak, gid, wbk, tmp and dmp. This can be cancelled if you are an advanced user who needs these types of files for immediate troubleshooting.
Defragments your HDD(s) and rearranges files based on the prefetch data gathered by Windows.
Displays a log of all the activities performed along with associated time stamps.
And more (detailed list of areas scanned by DiskMax is provided in the documentation).

So how does it perform? I ran it on a two and a half month old installation of Windows 7 Beta (build 7000), on which I had ran TuneUp Diskcleaner about 2 weeks ago. Here are the results.

The results were suddenly astounding. DiskMax managed to reclaim 15gb of disk space. On running another scan after a couple of weeks DiskMax reclaimed more than 900MB of free space. While your mileage may vary, you are probably going to be surprised by DiskMax anyway. Even on a fresh install DiskMax manages to reclaim more than 250mb of disk space. Once issue I have with DiskMax is control. I wish it allowed me a little more control. Whether it is during installation or during cleaning up. Another annoying aspect is that if you dont have an internet connection you would be made to wait for 10 seconds. This is annoying and pointless! On the whole DiskMax is a very impressive software which can really help you get rid of any unnecessary bulk.

Download DiskMax (757 KB)
Official Website
Version Reviewed : v4.0
Platforms Supported : Windows Vista/7 (v3 supports Windows XP)
License : Freeware