CCleaner
Version reviewed: 3.02.1343
Over the course of the life of any PC, you’re likely to find yourself installing and uninstalling various apps. Not only that, but some applications will write temporary files, and just generally make a mess. CCleaner goes some way towards managing that mess.
CCleaner has two main areas for finding and removing leftover rubbish. The first is the general ‘Cleaner’ tab. This targets specifics – temporary areas, histories, cookies, the Windows Recycle Bin, and so on. It also is aware of some applications, including the main browsers, and a few other mainstream applications (Office, Photoshop, 7Zip). The Cleaner process is aware of where these applications are likely to drop files, and will go specifically looking for them. Clicking the ‘Analyze’ button will show a list of the potential space to be freed during a cleanup. Pressing ‘Run Cleaner’ will actually delete the files – and it really does delete them for good. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, as it’s only looking for files you wouldn’t miss. It’s possible to turn off things you don’t want it cleaning. For example, I’m happy for my Chrome cache to be retained, so I untick this. I also unticked a few other things I’d rather hang on to.
The cleanup process itself occasionally misses a few files – this isn’t a fault of CCleaner itself, rather files being left open, or still in use by other applications on the PC. Having cleaned up these files you won’t see a massive boost to speed – the main benefit is in freeing disk space, and making defragmentation much cleaner.
The ‘Registry’ tab is the most interesting from a purely performance-based viewpoint. It scans through the registry and ‘sanity-checks’ the state of references to files and objects on the system. During uninstallation applications will sometimes remove files, but not the references to them within the Registry. This leads Windows to still attempt the load these non-existent files, which adds overhead to boot times and general performance. A first scan will reveal any potential issues. It’s then possible to select or deselect any registry entries you don’t want touched. I’ve tended to leave any references to .NET alone as I know .NET is a bit weird at times – it’s best left untouched in my view! Clicking Fix will then delete the erroneous registry entries. This does offer to back up the changes first by producing a large .REG export file. Reimporting this will return the registry to it’s pre-cleaned state.
The tools menu offers a few useful little utilities to manage the system further. Access to uninstall applications is provided, basically mirroring the Add/Remove or Programs items in Windows Control Panel, but also enabling the direct removal of items from the list that have been left behind – the Registry tab can remove those anyway though.
Startup items can be managed here, by enabling and disabling items. The current state can be saved for later reference. For example, after building a clean setup of your PC, you could take a snapshot of the current startup items, then compare it later.
The System Restore option allows you to remove any System Restore points you no longer need. These can be quite big (many hundreds of megabytes – sometimes multiple gigabytes depending on what has changed), so it’s useful to be able to remove them. There’s no other options, it’s just for removing them.
Finally, a Drive Wiper is provided to wipe disks, either free space (such as on the boot drive) or a whole disk (for removable media). The wiping methods given are comparable to the likes of DBan, giving 1, 3, 7, or 35-pass wipes, with varying complexity of them. Useful for the eternally paranoid, or if you simply needed to wipe a disk if you were going to sell it. A 7-pass wipe would be sufficient. A full 35-pass wipe would ensure all data is pretty much gone forever. The value of this function is that it’s possible to attach a disk to the PC, start it wiping, and carry on with other tasks. This isn’t possible with the likes of DBan as it requires rebooting into it’s own environment.
CCleaner is a great app for cleaning up the PC. I used to be wary of such apps, as they in some cases have something of a magic-bullet approach to them, and it’s hard to gauge exactly what they’re up to. CCleaner is very transparent in it’s operations, plus it is fast, and very capable.
CCleaner is free to download and use, but a support licence can be purchased. New versions are released incredibly often.