With your PC or laptop fans blowing air in and out of the system for years, chances are there’s a whole family of dust bunnies thriving inside your device. Our advice: Just get rid of the digital clutter. Third, temporary files can occasionally cause issues when running, working, or installing applications. From a privacy perspective, it’s a good idea to get rid of those regularly.

Second, some of these files contain logs of everything you do, such as temporary browsing data, tracking cookies, and Windows event logs.

Once that number drops below a certain point, things get extremely slow and Windows applications become unstable. I travel with a Surface Book, and its 256 GB SSD has about 15 GB of free space. First, depending on how many applications you have installed, and how much data you have stored (photos, videos, music, games), you’re going to hit that limit eventually, at which point every GB lost to “digital junk” counts. But I have a 500 GB hard disk - why should I clean my PC?