An AI assistant cleaned 30 GB of junk off an old laptop in three minutes

A writer at XDA asked an AI coding assistant to audit his four-year-old Windows laptop, and it found about 30 GB of clutter in around three minutes. The tool is Claude Code, running the Claude Sonnet 5.5 model. It only listed what it would remove. The owner decided what actually went.

What the scan found

The laptop is a 2022 Lenovo Legion 5 Pro. Before the AI step, the writer ran WizTree, a free tool that maps what is using disk space. About 213 GB of the main drive was in use. The Users folder held over 110 GB, and the Recycle Bin held 20 GB of files that had never been emptied.

At medium effort, the AI took three minutes and twenty-three seconds to produce a list ranked by how safe each item was to remove. The totals were:

• Junk files and caches: about 8 GB
• Old installers and files: about 14 GB
• Apps recommended for removal: about 8 GB

What counted as junk

Some of it came with the laptop. That included a 2021 Lenovo driver folder, the Lenovo Companion app and a McAfee upgrade task. The AI also flagged 23 stock apps, led by Clipchamp, Disney+ and Solitaire.

Other items were the owner's own doing. The scan turned up a ReasonLabs antivirus with seven services running next to Windows Defender, Lavasoft's Web Companion, and a 4.5 GB PanFone recovery folder left from his iPhone 7 days.

How he kept it safe

The prompt told the AI to audit first and change nothing. It had to show a table with sizes and safety levels, delete only approved items, and log each deletion. The writer also fenced off folders he could not afford to lose:

• OneDrive, because deletions there also remove the cloud copy
• System Volume Information, which holds the restore point he made first
• The Recovery folder, which Reset this PC and Startup repair rely on
• His work folders, including a Dev Drive, games, models and checkpoint files

He also switched Claude Code from its default auto mode to manual. Every deletion then waited for his sign-off.

What is not clear

The article text available here cuts off before the cleanup itself. It does not say how much space was actually freed after deletion, or how the laptop ran afterward. The writer's own verdict is that the approach worked better than any cleanup utility he has used. That is one person's experience on one machine.

What to do

The lesson for anyone with a full laptop is the method. Look at your own disk first so you can check the AI's suggestions. Create a restore point, which is a saved snapshot Windows can roll back to. Name the folders that are off limits. Make the assistant ask before it deletes anything.