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Windows 7 was reporting I had 9.49 GB space free on my primary C: (SSD) drive:
Windows Disk Cleanup reported I had 28.1 GB of "Temporary files" that could be deleted to get this space back (together with 206 MB of "Temporary Internet Files" and 154 MB of "Thumbnails" gives the 28.5 GB "Total" in the screenshot below).
I proceeded with the "Disk Cleanup" (logged in as an Administrator user). However, even after rebooting, the recovered space is only about 10 GB:
What's happened to the other 18+ GB? Checking "Disk Cleanup" again, now shows "Temporary files - 0 bytes" - so the files do appear to have been deleted - but why haven't I gained the amount of disk space I was promised?
UPDATE: After some digging, a number of other questions/sources seem to suggest that the amount of freeable space by Disk Cleanup is, at times, grossly overestimated?! For example:
Although, I did not first (manually) check the reported disk usage for the various locations Disk Cleanup uses when calculating the amount of "Temporary files", so I cannot confirm this.
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MrWhite sir, when you get a moment, you might find portions of or perhaps all of my answer here helpful https://superuser.com/questions/1187299/windows-7-cleanup-before-clonezilla-backup/1187334#1187334 with your cleanup task in particular. I just wanted to share this with you in case you find any usefulness with any portion of it modified, adjusted, etc. just in case.
– Pimp Juice IT – 2018-01-13T08:22:33.430When you delete a file, the space it occupied is marked as "Free", but sectors on your hard drive are not reset, they will be replaced by another file (and the space occupied by this new file will be marked as "Not free"). When you try to see how much free space you have, Windows will count all sectors marked as "Free", but if you have just cleaned your disk, this sectors might not be indexed yet. You should try to make a defragmentation to fix that. – Pierre LAGOUTTE – 2018-01-13T09:28:41.210
@PierreLAGOUTTE The "sectors" (or blocks in SSD speak) shouldn't need (re)indexing in order to report on the total disk allocation? Two days (and two reboots, with much idle time) later and there is no significant change in the reported free disk space. But, as stated, this is an SSD - AFAIK I shouldn't be defragging an SSD (there shouldn't be any need to)? – MrWhite – 2018-01-14T22:15:16.003