Alan_B

Yes and No It is NOT possible to do this with the built in "Include" section of my old version of CCleaner, BUT it MAY become possible in future. It IS ALREADY AVAILABLE when using winapp2.ini, even for my old version, e.g. I have added my own special portion to winapp2.ini of :- [*UserProfile] LangSecRef=3024 DetectFile=%USERPROFILE% Default=False FileKey1=%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\|*.*|RECURSE FileKey2=%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp\|*.*|RECURSE FileKey3=%USERPROFILE%\Temp\|*.*|RECURSE FileKey4=%APPDATA%\Adobe\Flash Player\|*.*|RECURSE Alan

Hi I was slightly ahead of you there ! ! My point 3 specifically refrained from referring to booting from a FLASH drive. I had in mind my 320 GB USB2 connected HARD drive with both FAT32 and NTFS partitions. And when I said "BUT it may be reluctant to use its built in knowledge to FIND those junk files," I really meant "There is no way that Ccleaner could distinguish between junk and vital files on Flash drive" but that would suggest I had more knowledge than the developers of Ccleaner, and therefore knew their limitations. If I include C:\Windows\System32\*.* for cleaning, it is POSSIBLE that Ccleaner would refrain from purging all the *.EXE files, BUT I assume that Ccleaner is more likely to obey orders ! ! Regards Alan

Why are they unused ? I have only encountered "unused extensions" when :- I have removed or un-installed an application or folder/file, OR if it is a data file that is used by a portable application. e.g. when I run something like VLC portable, Windows may decide to add an association for *.FLV, but I never had any luck double clicking a FLV file and getting VLC portable launched. I was ONLY able to play a FLV by launching Portable VLC first, and then selecting the file to play. If the file association refers to something I have just removed, or to a Portable Application data file, I immediately purge it. Otherwise I look for the cause before I purge. Alan

I disagree. 1. You can run portable Applications on a USB drive, and through no fault of your own they may create junk files you want to purge. 2. Ccleaner IS ABLE to clean a USB drive, even a Flash drive. You can stipulate all the Folders and Files that you wish to Include for deletion. BUT it may be reluctant to use its built in knowledge to FIND those junk files, other than in accordance with your specific directions of what to Include. 3. I suspect Ccleaner can also find for itself and then delete all the normal Windows junk files on a USB drive if you have booted into Windows on that USB drive and that USB drive is therefore your system partition. In practice however it may normally be simpler to put on the USB drive a simple Batch script to purge all the junk you anticipate when using the USB drive, and to run that script when you have finished using the drive. Regards Alan

I have in the past noticed that the same file may be reported more than once in the analyse, sometimes by full Windows name, and sometimes by short DOS name. Each instance is included in the Analyse total. But during Cleaning only the first one encountered will affect the amount deleted. Alan

Deleting an empty folder will NOT save any space. Deleting an empty folder can WASTE GIGABYTES - not what I use CCleaner for. I have especially adjusted one folder so that it and all its contents are compressed. When 2 GByte worth of log file text is written to it, only 1 GByte of disc space is consumed. The application that writes to this folder could fail if the folder is missing. I would be annoyed that the author had not anticipated absence, but more annoyed with CCleaner for a change that has caused inconvenience. Even if the application included "defensive programming" and recreated folders destroyed by maverick cleaners, it is unlikely that it would recreate it with my preference that contents be compressed. I remember that before XP there was AutoExec.bat, which typically emptied the TEMP folder. Does anyone know if start-up would be successful of AutoExec had an error when removing a missing folder ? Does anyone know if absolutely EVERY piece of Microsoft code would survive a missing TEMP folder ? I fully agree with the use of defensive programming that caters for the unexpected, but totally disagree with needless wanton destruction of folders. This imposes a special constraint that applications must NOT depend upon a folder, and deleting the folder has not saved any space. Some applications may create zero length files for future reference. Why should they be prohibited from testing the existence of empty folders ? If your favourite application failed to start properly when an empty log folder is missing, and instead enters "defensive mode" and recreates the empty folder, and assumes a new installation and continues to initialise and applied default configuration options, and then prompted for custom changes to configuration before it does the job you wanted, would you be happy with CCleaner for causing such pointless aggravation ? Alan

Normally when I close Firefox it closes properly and CCleaner will clean the cache - but not always. When I have trouble I launch Windows Task Manager :- Applications Tab - check that Firefox Task is absent, otherwise select and click "End Task" Processes Tab - select Firefox and click "End Process" If you need to kill the Firefox process every time, something is wrong with your installation. If it is a random intermittent problem then Windows is doing the best it can ! ! ! Alan

No - it depends upon how it is used. I can double click junk.txt and notepad launches and I can read the file, whilst notepad is displaying the file I can focus back to Windows Explorer and delete the file and it is gone, even though Notepad still shows what WAS there. I can launch CMD.EXE and issue the command ping -w 40 -n 100 127.0.0.1 >> junk.txt and whilst ping is running I can tell Windows Explorer to delete the file and am told "Cannot delete junk: It is being used by another person or program" Conclusions :- The O.S. will not allow files to be deleted when in use by SOME programs, and the 24 hour precaution is redundant for them, The O.S. WILL allow those same files to be deleted whilst in use by other programs, in which case the 24 hour precaution is appropriate Alan

If you disregard CCleaner, and simply use the Tools provided by Windows, then "System Restore" gives an option "Restore my computer to an earlier time". That will show a calendar and the highlighted days indicate restore points, and if there are no highlighted days there are no restore points available. and no restore points for CCleaner to find. Alan

That could be the problem, see post no. 2 in :- http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=1110 Last year I included "full winapp2.ini" and was appalled by the extra time taken for CCleaner to complete its launch and prepare for my commands. It may have taken longer for the actual cleaning, but since cleaning duration is affected by how much needs zapping I never noticed for the two occasions that I used it. After a couple of launches I removed 95% because much of it applied to applications I have never and will never use, and then I invented a couple of extra items for purging stuff that irritates me. My greatly streamlined winapp2.ini possibly adds half a second to CCleaner start-up. That I can live with. Alan

Launch Windows Task Manager BEFORE you analyze, and observe processes. When "the entire system freezes during the scan" the CPU column will show if it is entirely CCleaner causing the freeze, or if something else (e.g. Antivirus or "Behaviour Blocker" etc.) that is in conflict. Alan

I am fascinated by "Intel T2300 @166GHz" Looks like it is being over-clocked by a factor of 100 Alan

See CCleaner documentation at http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=16551 My implementation, using the Portable version of CCleaner, is shown at http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=23228 Regards Alan

Very useful to do this at every shutdown if you want to abort installations, UN-installations, and updates that may require a reboot to complete by using something they plant in a temporary location I find it convenient to ALMOST always shutdown with a double click of a desktop icon that launches CCleaner /AUTO / SHUTDOWN, with the sole exception of when I actually want something installed, and then I use a normal Windows reboot. Alan

How many GB are still in use ? Do you think that there is no further use for an installer when the application has been installed. On my machine I only have 81 items totalling 99.7 MB within C:\WINDOWS\Installer I seem to have INSTALLED only 5% of the number of applications of your defective UN-INSTALLATIONS. I rate as defective any installation package that fails to remove itself when it is told to remove the application. NB When an installer has installed an application it is not normally used on a daily basis, but it MAY be needed for reconfiguring some features of the application, and it almost certainly will be needed for un-installing the application. If you remove the installer you probably lose the official cleanup capability that knows where the application has buried bits of data in obscure locations in files and registry keys, and if you later remove the application you will have an awful lot more debris cluttering your system. If you update an application, the new installer may fail if it cannot run the old installer to cleanse the traces of the old, and yet to retain any licence / registration information. I archived the installer of PerfectDisk to a non-system drive, and then deleted the installer. When PerfectDisk was enhanced I downloaded the new installer, and totally failed to achieve an update until I restored the old installer to its intended location. Alan

I have added this to my Options/Include list :- C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download\*.* Unless I am (UN)installing something that requires a reboot to complete, I will shut down the computer by launching CCleaner in /AUTO /SHUTDOWN mode, and that ensures any sneaky Microsoft updates are zapped before they can install on shutdown. Alan

If all Norton malware protection has been replaced by CCleaner the computer's speed and response could be affected by malware. Alan

I have never seen anything like that. The Firefox download manager has a progress bar and a running count of MB transferred. I suggest you explain what you were downloading, from where, and with what. CCleaner is NOT a malware fighter, but is designed to erase redundant junk files, and some malware consider this as a hostile act because they hide in TEMP files. Perhaps you had a keylogger quietly logging and when CCleaner destroyed its home the keylogger phoned home and then deliberately trashed the system a bit to obscure its past activities. Alan

I remember seeing a clue in a post in this forum that suggested to me that when CCleaner removes a Restore Point it has a quick poke somewhere so that the relevant pointer is cancelled and the System Restore calendar no longer offers that as a valid point. Along with that I had the impression that the corresponding 60 MB folder, typically C:\System Volume Information\_restore{F6EA6CAA-B744-447E-8F9E-B9A9507C7CB4}\RP1048 would not been damaged - in which case YOU CAN VALIDLY RESTORE TO remaining points prior to this, but you still have 60 MB of junk. If however that impression is wrong, and the folder is removed, unless all its A0??????.??? files and change.log files are somehow preserved, then A0273667.exe will no longer exist, and change.log.7 will no longer tell me that it is a copy made before C:\Utils\TeraCopy\TeraCopy.exe was deleted. Without A0273667.exe it will not be possible to restore the previous version of TeraCopy.exe, and without change.log.7 there is no knowledge that C:\Utils\TeraCopy\TeraCopy.exe previously existed. I could of course be wrong in my deductions, but I do not believe in magic. I can accept that CCleaner might relocate A0273667.exe and change.log.7 to a previous R.P., but I would consider that to be most UNSAFE since Microsoft themselves are totally confused over whether or not Firefox Cache is "User data" to be excluded from a R.P. I would appreciate a definitive answer from the developers upon what CCleaner actually does, and its consequences, when it takes out a Restore Point in the middle of a series. Regards Alan

First thing to do is phone any banks / credit cards to enquire about unusual activities - perhaps you have been hacked. Perhaps when you enter your email address and password you are NOT giving them to ning but to malware that has come on-board and phoned home with passwords and credit card numbers. If you use a different computer to visit ning you may find that a hacker has been impersonating you there. Alan

I really do not believe what M.$ say about System Restore. There is absolutely no way that when you restore to a mid-point that you get a cumulative restore from the oldest R.P up to the selected R.P. because EVERY R.P. will hold the complete system state of the Registry as at the time of creation, but NONE of the R.P. hold a multi-giga-byte image of your Windows System Files. The only complete system state is the right now state of C:\, and when you use System Restore it uses change-logs and A0????.* files in the latest R.P to remove your latest file updates and to re-instate any previous versions, and then it goes to the previous version to do the same again, and keeps on until it reaches the R.P. you chose, after which it copies the registry hives from the chosen R.P. If you COMPLETELY delete the latest R.P. then System Restore will not be able to determine the latest changes and would possibly refuse to go back; but if it did try it would probably introduce even more "features" than normal. I will admit that I do not know if CCleaner does a COMPLETE deletion of a Restore Point (typically 60 MByte for me), or if it merely cancels an entry in the Restore Point calendar and leaves behind 60 MByte of junk; not what I would expect of an efficient file cleaner - but I read somewhere that this anomaly might exist. Alan

Sounds good but might be a pig. Windows Add/Remove does that sort of thing, but badly. It takes a long time thinking about it, and when it eventually appears the sizes shown are often unrelated to reality. I can easily imagine CCleaner could implement this requirement and make it faster or more accurate, but to achieve both simultaneously might be a challenge. Alan

Bloat is unwelcome bloat, even if it is only 20 kb. Actually it is NOT 20 kb. It is 652 kb if you are lucky. I have a version of WinDirStat that is 652 kb AFTER I stripped out all foreign languages. The standard installation has to be far worse. They have a blog that reports their product gets a False Positive malware alert. Do we really want more malware alerts by updating CCleaner and having Windirstat come along for the ride ? I have just launched Windirstat. It took 29 Seconds to load and for me to authorise suspected malware and then to analyse all partitions, And when I selected partition C:\ it took a further 180 Seconds for all the Pacman heads to complete their munching and show the sizes and files at the first level of C:\. I have only 51,000 files on C:\ because most of my user files are in other partitions. Many people keep everything on C:\. It takes only 2.5 Seconds to launch CCleaner and Analyse. Do we really need to wait another 2 minutes whilst WinDirStat gets of the launching pad ? You can launch any program by various means, including Windows => All programs. It would be sensible to cluster together CCleaner and WinDirStat within one Windows => All programs => Disk Tools, but you could just as sensibly add to that cluster a Defragger + Partition Manager + Disc image Archiver + on demand malware scanner. What would NOT be sensible is to launch the whole cluster of tools when only one is needed. Alan

I followed your suggestion in post 2 and arrived at http://www.ccleaner.com/download/builds Unless you mean the "C" with a paint brush at the top of the page then you were wrong, I have to choose one of 4 builds, and when I select the Standard build I see two icons suggesting Recuva and Defraggler. If you could give a screenshot it might be helpful. What is to you "a box of dashes" could be something else to some-one else, e.g. a box awaiting a password. If you could give a screenshot it might be helpful. Alternatively you can hover over the desktop icon and right click to select properties. That will show if it has been write protected, and what it is pointing to. Alan

That is a new requirement, which should be met by adding /AUTO, i.e. START CCLEANER /AUTO My personal preference is to also save several more clicks by NOT invoking a shutdown manually. Instead of running CCleaner at start-up and then waiting for it to do its job, I clean everything BEFORE start-up, i.e. at close of business on the previous shutdown. ALL users do this on OUR computer so free space is maximised because no profile holds temporary junk, where-as deferring cleanup until start-up leaves most of the profiles clogged with junk. Additionally it reduces the amount of time and space taken for Acronis to create a backup image of C:\ That I achieve with START CCLEANER /AUTO /SHUTDOWN I fully agree with Andavari, Batch files are irreplaceable. One of my Firefox Addons has 50 different language folders, each with several large files. Only the 1.5% of the concise English folder is of use to me. The other 98.5% of the more verbose languages is junk to be removed. Every time that Addon is updated it also has more additional foreign languages to be eliminated. I cannot be bothered to edit a special section of Winapp2.ini to additionally remove the new foreign languages as well, So a simple addition of 3 lines in my batch script will rename and protect the English folder whilst all language folders are removed, and then restore the English folder back to normality. Alan