Add Disk Cleanup to right-click menu of drives in Windows 7

The Disk Cleanup utility can free up space on your hard disk. Disk Cleanup finds and then removes temporary files on your computer that you decide you no longer need. Normally you have run the Disk Cleanup from the Start Menu shortcuts, but you can also add the Disk Cleanup to the right-click menu of hard disks. Here is how :

Adding Disk Cleanup to right-click menu of hard drives

Note : You must have administrator level access to follow these steps.

  1. Press the key combination Windows logo key + R to open the Run dialog.
  2. In the Run Dialog, type regedit and press Enter to open the Registry Editor.

    Run Dialog in Windows 7

  3. In the Registry Editor navigate to the following key :
    HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTDriveshell
  4. Create a subkey by right-clicking on shell and selecting New → Key and give it a name diskclean. Change the default value under the newly created key to Disk Clean as shown.

    Creating a new key diskclean in the Registry Editor

  5. Then create another subkey by right-clicking on the newly created key diskclean and selecting New → Key. Give the new subkey a name Command and change the default value under it to cleanmgr.exe /d %1 as shown.

    Creating a new subkey Command in the Registry Editor

  6. That’s it. Now you can close the Registry Editor window.

You can also download the readymade Registry scripts to automatically add the values to the Registry. Download win7_diskclean_menu.zip. Extract the contents to a folder and double-click on add_diskclean_menu.reg to run it. You will find the Disk Clean menu is added to drives.