Kramy

I just created Windows Firewall rules to block it, since I don't know what it's doing. Problem (mostly?) solved. Might make a startup script that runs 2 minutes after boot and TaskKill's CCleaner in case anything like this is ever tried again. Edit: Just make a new task run 1 minute after login, set it to Admin privs, start this action: Run: C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe Arguments: /IM CCleaner64.exe /f Voila, problem solved.

That must be why they build defragmenting into all their installers and updaters. To be hypocrites. (During the optimization phase when installing or updating, they use a tool like wincontig to defragment all the files. ) http://wincontig.mdtzone.it/en/ Whether it is necessary really depends on your OS, programs, and storage. Hard drives can get a performance boost by moving important files to the faster edge of the drive, and ensuring files can be read in one spin. Solid State Drives (on the other hand) do not require defragmenting, and it actually reduces performance and wears them out faster. (SSDs are newer/faster drives that use NAND flash rather than spinning magnetic platters. Tablets and smartphones use NAND for storage, as do many high end PCs.) Certain operating systems and programs do a better job of avoiding the need to defrag all the time. On Linux there is a filesystem feature that allows the OS to indicate the size required to store something. They call it 'extents' - so when you download a 1.5GB file, Linux can place the file in a large empty area. Windows has no such feature, so it fills whatever gaps are available as the data comes in. This is especially obvious if you have a drive for downloads - as you fill it, files will end up unfragmented... then as you clear out old downloads to make space for new ones, you leave gaps everywhere, which Windows then tries to fill. Over time you end up with so many gaps, that Windows will dump practically every 1MB in a new tiny space, so a 1.5GB download can end up in thousands of fragments. This screenshot demonstrates it perfectly. All that said, an SSD would not care that the data is fragmented. Most can read upwards of 100,000 fragments per second, while spinning hard drives are limited to 100-200 fragments due to the travel time of the read/write head... you can see why defragmenting a hard drive might be a good idea when fragmentation gets really bad. That said, on drives with large numbers of files, defragmenting can take ages - days or even weeks! On such drives, I prefer to just copy all files to a scratch drive, reformat, and then copy them all back. This won't be an option for your OS/Windows drive, but it does work for storage or backup drives. If doing so, it's recommended to use a tool that verifies everything copied correctly, such as TeraCopy. It has a 'test on write' feature that checks the CRC checksums of all files to verify they copied correctly. http://codesector.com/downloads It may not be compatible with every version of Windows, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend replacing the regular Windows filecopy dialog with it. (It will ask.) It has limited support for super long paths, which are getting more and more common, and can spit out some cryptic error messages. The main developer seems to have abandoned it. I agree that most users do it far too often. Avoid doing it for Solid State Drives, do it occasionally for Hard Disk Drives - but be sure to check Defraggler's health tab first to see if any error counts have moved beyond 0, before working the drive really hard. If you're a more advanced user, controlling where data ends up can be a useful strategy and have a bigger impact on performance than defragmenting. Hard drives get progressively slower towards the end, due to the laws of a circle's circumference. (More data passes under the read/write head in one spin on the edge... less data in the centre of the platter.) Thus if you have something important like Windows, Games, an empty partition for FRAPS recording, etc., you would want those things on the first part of the drive(s). The end of the drive(s) will be slower, so you stick things there that aren't as important... downloads, archived/encoded footage, old video files, etc. I see it all the time where people pack their drives 95% full, install a new game, then complain on forums or Steam that it stutters horribly. (And of course blame the developer.) Load the game onto an empty drive (or tiny partition at the start of a drive) and there's no stutters. It's because of this... The blue line represents the speed reading sequentially (In a line - a non-fragmented file.) It is over twice as fast at the start of the drive than it is at the end. The yellow dots represent moves to a file to begin reading it. Towards the start of the drive it averages about 10ms, but by the end it's up to 20ms. At 60fps a game has 16.66ms to draw each frame. Some games use a 2-3 frame buffer to reduce stuttering, but increase input lag. If a game suddenly realizes it needs a model or texture to continue, it will have to wait for it... and if it needs five of them, it has a problem. At the start of the drive it might be stuck for 50ms, pretty much draining the 3-frame buffer, and possibly causing a stutter. At the end of the drive, it would be stuck for at least 100ms. Probably more, since on a clogged 95%+ full drive, the files may be fragmented as well. Put each texture or model in just 3-4 pieces, and watch as the game stutter becomes 300ms or more - very noticeable. No offense, but I wonder if CCleaner even caused your PC's problems. Your computer is getting slow? Could you download/install Defraggler and post a screenshot of the Health tab? I'm wondering if your PC's odd behaviour is being caused by a failing hard drive. Sounds like one of your adobe programs may be corrupting your files and their support took the easy path out and blamed it on CCleaner. Just my opinion based on what I read. If your hard drive checks out okay and you never ran CCleaner registry cleaning, I lean towards Adobe's software being at fault. -Kramy

This is still a problem. On certain PCs, way more is shown than should be.

I don't believe it's normal to show DirectX10 or any of those Windows Live sub-components as removable components? Seems like a bug to me. If you actually remove them, bad things happen. I don't believe they are? The forum resized them, but checking the background the white is no longer pure 255,255,255. It has a mixture of other whites, which is what JPEG usually does. Also, the filesize doesn't match up - when I take the image after the forum has altered it and save it as PNG, it drops by 80KB. That suggests the forum resizes and saves lossy, but doesn't bother to adjust the file name. I could be wrong... but that's what it looks like. I'd need to re-download a hex editor to confirm it. Any which way, the simple solution is to check the filesize before and after resizing, then decide which one to keep. Edit: Attached Image. -Kramy

A friend of mine was removing toolbars and stuff in CCleaner. He removed something, the list refreshed, and suddenly tons of hidden stuff was visible. Just taking a quick look, it appears to be windows components and OEM preinstall stuff. Things that should NOT be visible. They are not visible in Programs and Features, so it seems to be CCleaner specific. Uninstalling and reinstalling did not correct it. How do we shut off these important components being visible, so that he doesn't remove something important? At one point it was also showing every supported language for the AMD Catalyst Control Centre, although that disappeared after a reboot and driver update. Totally unrelated, but the forum software just took a bunch of large perfect quality 80KB PNGs and turned them into blurry small hard to read 240KB JPGs. Nice! -Kramy

Yes, the built-in defrag is faster. Even at its slowest moments, it's faster than one 4KiB file per couple seconds. I just tried MyDefrag. It took about 1 hour and 50 minutes to do the volume, using the Monthly Data Disk preset. It moved almost every file into one huge multi-hundred-GB chunk at the end of the partition.

It doesn't seem to be leaving holes, but it's still taking 20+ hours. As the number of files on the drive increases, the amount of time per file goes up. It's now at ~4 seconds. Possible, but unlikely. I looked into it for Vista. While Vista did succeed in having higher CPU usage for every core, this was mainly due to increased overhead. In a few benchmarks it scored 5-10% better, but this was actually due to kernel optimizations, rather than better multi-core support. It shows if you restrict them to just a single core, and everything else to other cores. Also, Linux would run those benchmarks with scores 40+% higher, proving there's a long way to go yet. Win7 may have changed that. It seems like they're finally threading stuff properly, so I/O doesn't completely block the UI for stupid reasons. More threads will naturally run better on more cores, assuming there's no shared resources and locking to completely tank performance. But in my case I went the other direction. I used nLite to strip back XP to ~10 processes, and ~100 threads, which makes it quite speedy for games. But don't worry - I wouldn't post here without verifying the exact same behaviour on a regular XP install. When I had my Athlon X2, the framerates for CPU-bound games (in particular, Source games) went up 20-25% by stripping the OS down. (80fps -> ~95-100fps)

Agreed. I've been running Spybot and MBAM monthly for years, and they've never found anything dangerous. Several times daily...

It used to be an Athlon X2 from ~2007, but thanks to Asus and their good BIOS support, it supports Phenom II X4's. I had to do some video encoding, so I upgraded. In 2007 the only option was XP or Vista, so the choice is entirely obvious.

Hi. See my thread here: http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=28804 Copying a 4KiB file appears to take several seconds in Defraggler. I think it's taking a bit too long trying to find the right spot...

Hello there. I have a few games which stupidly don't have their gamedata zipped. Because of this, my game partition has about 400k files in it. Defraggler takes close to 20 hours to defragment this. Is there some way to make this go faster? Or some change that could be made in Defraggler to speed this up? I'm on XP Pro SP3. I have 3GB+ of RAM free, and 4 cores, but Defraggler only uses a little bit of memory and 30% CPU. (Two threads? Logic in one, I/O in another?) Also, it seems to leave small holes everywhere. If I were to download something to my game partition after defragmenting, such as a 700MB Ubuntu ISO over HTTP, then afterwards it's split into several thousand fragments. Is this normal? Shouldn't it be split into only a couple fragments? If I download to C:\ instead, which only has 10k files, then the same file is only in a few dozen fragments. -Kramy

Neat program. But the About box needs to be fixed. The links don't visit the actual website, like they do for your other software. Maybe the "http://" is missing - this is all that comes up: Cheers, for all the free software.

Didn't help. Open Containing Folder works fine in XP search and every other program I've seen it in. It just fails in Defraggler, on every computer in my home. Edit: Here's the File Mon info. Maybe that can help pinpoint where the execution request is going. Would it be more helpful if I dumped file access from every exe/dll?

For whatever reason, the 'Open Containing Folder' option fails and does nothing. To my knowledge, all you have to do to get that to work is pass a quoted path to Explorer.exe; not sure why it doesn't work, on any of my comps...

It seems to me that CCleaner is a vastly simpler program, from a coding standpoint. Defragmenting a drive requires some low level filesystem access, and probably requires a kernel mode driver. CCleaner just deletes files and stuff... maintaining the deletion lists is more work than creating the program that deletes stuff.