How-To

Make Windows Run Disk Cleanup Automatically with Task Scheduler

By Brian Burgess

Updated December 7, 2021

Running Disk Cleanup regularly in Windows is an important part of keeping your system running smooth. Remembering to do it is the hard part. Here’s how to make it happen automatically.

Running Disk Cleanup regularly in Windows is an integral part of keeping your system running smoothly. Here’s how to create a Scheduled Task to run this maintenance utility automatically.

Note: This will work with Windows 8, Windows 7, Vista, and XP

We previously showed you how to run Disk Cleanup and how to clean temp files it misses. But remembering to run it regularly is the challenging part.

Set Windows to Run Disk Cleanup Automatically

First, some command line magic — click Start and type: cmd in the search box. Hit Enter.

At the command prompt, type: cleanmgr.exe /sageset:1 then hit Enter.

The Disk Cleanup Settings window opens. Click the files you want to have Disk Cleanup delete. Click OK and close out of the command prompt.

Create a Scheduled Task

To create the Scheduled Task, click Start and type: task scheduler into the search box. Hit Enter.

When Task Scheduler comes up, you need to create a new task. Click Action and click Create Basic Task.

The Create Basic Task Wizard starts. Type in a name for the task and description. Click Next.

On the Task Trigger screen, select how often you want to run it. Here I’m selecting Monthly.

Next, select the date and time each month you want the task to run.

Under Action select Start a Program.

In the Program/script field type: C:\Windows\system32\cleanmgr.exe

In the Add Arguments field type: /sagerun:1 and click Next.

You’ll get a summary of the task you just created. Click Finish.

Now Disk Cleanup will run monthly at the selected time automatically.

Nowadays, more music and video are streamed from the cloud via services like Spotify, MOG, or Amazon Instant Video. So, there’s less of a need to have gigabytes of media files stored.

Still, there’s plenty of people who still have extensive media collections on their computer hard drive. Even if the files aren’t ripped CDs or DVDs, there’s plenty of home videos and pictures that you might not trust to be saved on Google Drive or SkyDrive. I know I’m not too fond of cloud services to default to automatically save my pictures. It’s more important to have them on my local Windows system.

Even though you might have less to store, and hard drive space is easy to come by these days, running cleaning up your hard drive regularly is still vital for an overall healthy computer.