BleachBit is an open-source system cleanup tool that has become very popular in past few years. It can clean the junk files, obsolete entries, left-over folders from your file system and the Windows Registry. It can also shred files from your system. When it shreds files, it deletes them after overwriting them with random data. This way those files can never be recovered even by data recovery professionals.
When you install BleachBit, it also installs a context-menu item on your system for shredding files using BleachBit. This option is great if you want to shred your files frequently. But if you use the BleachBit shredder very less often, then you can safely choose to remove the “Shred with BleachBit” entry from the right-click context-menu.
For removing this context-menu entry, you do not have to edit in Registry entries at all. You can follow these simple and very easy steps:
- First of all open System settings (Win+I) and go to “Apps and Features” section.
- Locate BleachBit from the list of installed apps, select it and click on the “Uninstall” button. This will launch the BleachBit uninstaller. You can follow the on-screen instructions to remove it from your system.
- Download latest version of BleachBit from https://www.bleachbit.org/.
- Use the new installer to install BleachBit on your system. During the installation, make sure to uncheck Integrate Shred option. Then proceed with the usual installation.
- Now you have the latest version of BleachBit on your system and the “Shred with BleachBit” option has disappeared.
BleachBit is a very useful tool for cleaning up and optimizing your computer. It also adds to the user privacy by shredding the files. It helps in freeing up disk space by deleting unnecessary files and clearing caches from various applications such as web browsers. But if you don’t like the shredder context-menu from BleachBit then you can find the above instructions helpful.