Get your disk space back. Without a registry cleaner, and without being sold to.
Download · What it does · Screenshots · What it refuses to do · Build from source · Licence
There are gigabytes on a typical Windows machine that nothing needs: Windows Update leftovers, the delivery-optimisation cache, crash dumps, thumbnail and icon caches, per-browser caches, and the memory dump from a blue screen nobody is going to analyse. CleanGeek finds them, tells you exactly how much each one is worth, and removes only what you tick.
The scan and the clean are always two separate steps. You see the number before anything is deleted, and the recovered total afterwards.
This is the other category with a deservedly poor reputation, so again, plainly:
- There is no registry cleaner, and there will not be one. It is the headline feature of every product in this space and it does not work. Nothing measurable gets faster, nothing gets more stable, and the failure mode is a machine that will not start. The upside is zero. We are not shipping it for the sake of a bullet point.
- Saved passwords are not a cleanup target. Not off by default — not present at all.
- Cookies, history and saved form data are off by default, and each one says in plain words what clearing it will cost you before you tick it.
- Nothing is deleted outside a known, named list. No wildcard sweeps of your profile.
- The Recycle Bin is only emptied when you explicitly tick it, never as part of "clean everything".
- The component store (WinSxS) is not a folder it deletes from. It is serviced, not swept.
If it has genuinely grown too large the supported tool is
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup, and that is a decision to make deliberately rather than as part of a sweep. - The Prefetch folder is left alone. Emptying it makes the next few starts slower, not faster.
- No telemetry, no account, no bundled offers, no paid tier.
- 🧹 Cleans what is actually safe to clean — temporary files, Windows Update and delivery optimisation leftovers, crash dumps, thumbnail and icon caches, browser caches, the system memory dump, previous Windows installations.
- 🔢 Shows the number first — every item reports what it would recover before anything is removed, and the headline never counts something you have not ticked.
- ✅ Nothing ticked by default except caches and temporary files. Everything with a cost is opt-in, and says in plain words what that cost is.
- 📦 Lists everything installed, and hands an uninstall to the publisher's own uninstaller.
- 🚀 Shows what starts with Windows, and which entries you should leave alone.
- ⏰ Scheduled scan — it measures on a schedule and writes the result to the log. It never deletes on a schedule; there is no command line that can.
- ℹ️ About and Check for updates — the same two buttons every TechyGeeksHome tool has, at the foot of the sidebar. The update check runs only when you press it.
- 🔒 Skips anything in use — nothing is removed from under a running process.
Shipping the reading half first is deliberate, and it is the same order DriverGeek took: it is most of the value with none of the risk, and the half that changes things then lands on a codebase people have already been running.
| 1.0 | Coming | |
|---|---|---|
| Cleaning the items on the Clean screen | ✅ | |
| Emptying the Recycle Bin, when you tick it on its own | ✅ | |
| Listing installed applications, and uninstalling one | ✅ | |
| Listing what starts with Windows | ✅ | |
| Switching a startup entry off | 1.1 | |
| Sign-in scheduled tasks in the startup list | 1.1 | |
| Store apps on the Installed screen | 1.1 |
CleanGeek stays in its lane. The rest of the range already covers the neighbouring jobs:
| If you want to | Use |
|---|---|
| See what is eating your disk, visually | DiskGeek |
| Update your installed software | AppGeek |
| Update your drivers | DriverGeek |
Clean — measures first, and removes only what you tick.
The confirmation — what is about to go, in words, before it goes.
Installed — everything installed, uninstalled through the publisher's own uninstaller.
Startup — what starts with Windows, and what to leave alone.
Settings — including a plain list of what CleanGeek will not do.
⬇ Download CleanGeek — Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
| File | What it is | Size |
|---|---|---|
CleanGeekSetup.exe |
Installer. Start-menu entry, uninstalls cleanly. | 29.1 MB |
CleanGeek-portable.exe |
One file. Run it from anywhere, install nothing. | 86.5 MB |
SHA256SUMS.txt |
Checksums for both, published with every release. | — |
Nothing else needs installing — .NET is inside the executable.
To verify what you downloaded, in PowerShell:
Get-FileHash .\CleanGeekSetup.exe -Algorithm SHA256and compare it against the line in SHA256SUMS.txt.
First run: Windows may show a blue "Windows protected your PC" box. That is SmartScreen reacting to an executable it has not seen before, not a detection — CleanGeek is not code-signed, because a certificate costs more per year than this whole range earns. Click More info → Run anyway. The published SHA-256 is there so you never have to take that on trust.
CleanGeek makes exactly one network request, and only when you press Check for updates: a single unauthenticated GET to GitHub's public releases API, asking whether there is a newer tag than the build you are running. It sends no machine identifier, no record of what you scanned and no usage data — GitHub sees an IP address and a user agent, exactly as it would if you opened the releases page in a browser. It never downloads or installs anything; if there is a newer version it offers you the release page, and that is all.
Nothing is requested when the app starts. Open it, use it, close it, and it makes no network connection at all.
Requires the .NET 8 SDK.
.\build.cmdThat builds the solution, runs the checks, and publishes the portable build to
publish\portable\CleanGeek.exe. To do the steps yourself:
dotnet build CleanGeek.sln -c Release
dotnet run --project tests\CleanGeek.Tests -c ReleaseThe rules about what may be deleted live in src/CleanGeek.Core, which targets plain net8.0
and touches no Windows API, so the checks build and run anywhere — including CI, on a runner
with no files to lose. Everything that talks to Windows is in src/CleanGeek.
Found a bug or have a request? Open an issue or get in touch. Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
If CleanGeek gets you your weekend back, buy us a coffee. It is never required and nothing is withheld without it.
CleanGeek is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 — see LICENSE and gnu.org. Anyone may use, modify and share it; a distributed modification must publish its source under the same licence.
Free for everyone, including commercial use.
© 2026 TechyGeeksHome | Andrew Armstrong.