There are hundreds of tools which promise they’re the ideal solution for cleaning up your hard drive, but in our experience the vast majority are a huge disappointment, achieving little more than Windows own Disk Cleanup applet.

And so our expectations of JFRemover (a brand new temporary file remover) were, well, low. To put it mildly.

The first view of the program’s rather basic interface didn’t do much to change this, thanks to some less-than-intuitive design. But we soon figured out that checking “Analyze” and clicking Clean would report on the files JFRemover could delete (but not actually clean them), and sat back to await the results.

And they proved something of a surprise. Not only did JFRemover outperform the Windows Disk Cleanup applet on our test PC, but it even claimed to have found more junk files than the excellent CCleaner (1.79GB vs 1.44GB).

Find and remove all kinds of hard drive clutter - in a click

These totals can’t always be trusted, so as a crosscheck we allowed CCleaner to clean our system, then ran JFRemover again. And sure enough, the apparent performance lead fell, although it did still find a few more files to delete (177MB worth).

But this was just the start. Click Options and you’ll find many other areas which the program can check – logs, caches, temporary folders and more – which gives JFRemover even more cleaning power.

Of course this isn’t necessarily a good thing, as it all depends on exactly what you’re deleting, and that’s where JFRemover may cause problems.

The program can be configured to wipe all kinds of files which should normally be kept – error reports, prefetch folder, system restore data – which makes it risky for use by PC novices.

And there are no warning messages about the potential consequences of any of this, either.

CCleaner remains our favourite disk cleanup tool, then, thanks to its lengthy feature list, addons, high level of configurability, and more.

But if you’re always on the lookout for alternatives then JFRemover is at least worth considering. The interface isn’t great, but it’s surprisingly capable, and if you know what you’re doing can be configured to free up a great deal of disk space (although, please, be very careful how you use it).