mr don

Bo, try to restore back to a date when everything was there using windows System Restore tool. The second option, is try Handy Recovery. It works when many other recovery programs fail, & can even strip passwords from password protected user accounts (forgot your password?) & recover those. Hope this helps!

Defraggler 1.19 wants to connect to the internet. Bad! As did 1.18 & other versions. Even unselecting update during install fails, because the first thing Defraggler does is check for updates. You cannot install Defraggler silently offline, no sirree! Internet Connection not found! I have to manually go in, uncheck update, & set it to save settings to ini. Because disabling update from the installer does not work! It STILL connects to check for an update (Although you already downloaded the latest update & do not care to check the web for the latest update, because you just downloaded the latest one...) CCleaner does not give an internet connection not found error, so why does Defraggler? It is so annoying! I know, I know, such a small bug, but it bugs me, & I am pretty sure it does others here, doesn't it? Anyone?

I would second this idea. BUT! A much better idea is to either partition your drive off using W7 disk manager into 2 partitions, then move your pics to a Pictures folder, vids to a Video folder etc, OR, just use an external drive to put them on. Now, before people here say, hey, but making a folder is the same thing as making a partition, only you don't have to do as much work, NO IT IS NOT! You can do things with a second partition that you cannot with a folder. A partition is treated as a separate drive, a folder is not. Therefore, if partition C gets hit by a virus, in most cases, D is unaffected. So you can format C, or fix C, then D is still untouched! Additionally, putting all those files on a second partition will prevent Defraggler, Antivirus apps, Anti-malware apps, & other tools from having to defrag through & search through tons of files. It will drastically speed up the search/scan/repair times. If I were you, I would partition your drive, & dump the 75 GB pics into a folder you create called Pictures. Do the same for other large folders you have. Save enough room on the partition for all the files you plan to move. This will make the things you do on C much faster, reduce wear, extend the life of the drive, reduce the chance of malware/virus corruption of your files! Even faster still, is simply moving it all to an external drive that you only use when needed!

Hazel, I don't know how many computers you work with. But I work with a lot. Of course, I also have hundreds of thousands of apps. Most apps call for SP2 or later. SP1 is out of the question. SP3 is newer, but it has a few nasty bugs & just doesn't work, or work properly with some things. There is the claimed 10% faster speed, but at the expense of more bugs & things not working properly. There are a lot of apps, yes, that do work fine in SP3, but there are also a lot that SP3 fatally breaks dead. I am not advising the service pack reversal because of the loss of support, I am advising simply because I do work on a lot of computers for people. And I have seen a lot more problems with SP3 machines than I have SP2 machines. SP2, for the most part, just simply works with applications. SP3 is halfbaked. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. I can tell them that SP2 is the best because I work on computers a lot & I know. SP2 will still continue to work properly with or without support. Support is nice, but advising people to keep a buggy Service Pack, simply to keep them in a supported OS can sometimes backfire. Please be aware, Hazel, I do not hate you, but I do not feel that you are aware of the extent of the number of computers I have worked on & the problems I have seen with SP3. There are a lot of people around here (& I assume where you live also) that claim to work on computers a lot with no problems with SP3 because they do not really understand as much about computers & what is causing the problems. I worked in a computer place a while back, & I fixed computers that had been back there for years, no-one was able to fix them, including one that was password protected in the bios, but had 2 chips you had to jump, not 1. And it was not near the battery like newer ones, but near the side of the board (older machine). I also did some other things while I was there that I do not have the room to discuss here. Please understand Hazel, a Service Pack does not require human intervention to work. It is, after all, software, & will still work after you, me, & others are dead & gone.

I have the same problem. I already know the most current CCleaner version, & I always manually update. I hate waiting a few seconds for the installer to check. Turn off auto updating & make it manually selectable. Solves lots of problems & saves bandwidth!

Completely uninstall the old version, delete the settings.ini file, & download/install the new 1.19 version. Report here if you are still having the same problem. Thanks!

Have you tried to use CTRL + click? It allows individual keys to be selected & deselected. Using this in addition to shift + click can work wonders. We do need a search through results found, however. That is a fact.

Yes, I have some. - How much free space do you have on your drive? - What processor do you have, an AMD or Intel one? How fast is it? - What windows version do you have, & what service pack is it? - How much RAM do you have? I can come up with some other suggestions if you provide me with these. Also, did it just start? When did it first happen with you? * Try to run System Restore to a date before this happened. * If you are running XP with SP3, revert back to SP2. SP2 is much more stable. * You seem to be running 1.18 of defraggler. / Be sure it is closed, uninstall it, delete the program file dir where it says Defraggler (get rid of the .ini settings file too). / Download the version 1.19 of defraggler, install it, & try that to see what it does. Be sure to send the information back for your PC that I listed above if none of the steps I gave to you work. I do have other things you can try if that fails. Thank you! P.S. Let me know if it works, & if so, which. If not, report your sys info here so I can help you further.

I can see that you are using Win XP, but what Service Pack? SP3 is notorious for this kind of behavior. SP2 is a lot more stable. Would help to know how much RAM you have, processor type (AMD or Intel) & processor clock speed. Thank you!

Download Malwarebytes Install, update definition, & run a full scan. Sounds like you could have a malware installed that causes errors. I had similar probs with firefox generating an error on close, system task manager not working, avg installing + updating but resident shield + scanning did not work. After removal of certain malware, all things went back to normal.

My question is, was this a bug or feature? Did they have a reason, say, speed it up or anything? What gives?

Service pack 3 has compatibility problems at times with certain things. If you revert to SP2, I believe you will find your problem corrected. SP3 seems to work ok for some things, but start applying updates, n soon, you have a broken machine. Go back to SP2. It is more stable, reliable, & just plain works. Then End.

I know they shouldn't, but that isn't the issue. The issue is that MS sometimes fuddles things. I have seen bad drivers cause system hangups when "updated" etc. Well, it shouldn't, it really shouldn't!!!

I would consider it a feature, to wipe the restore points while cleaning, however. If you are going to erase evidence, RP's have plenty of evidence to hide, so removing those will take care of windows storing earlier versions of trash you wanted to be rid of! However, the restore point control could add a simple way to remove all RP's, in my opinion, then restart the RP process & generate a totally new & clean one! Also, while on some systems there may be no use to you in deleting a few restore points, I HAVE seen computers that had a lot, lot, lot of restore points. The bigger the drive, the more space is allocated by default for restore point controls, since it goes by percent. 12% is allocated by default, no matter how large or small a drive is. What is 12% of a 1,000 GB drive? Yes, that is 120 GB! I have seen comps with many, many, many gigs of restore points that were not cleaned in months, & months! I have also seen a computer that had so much internet & temporary file trash that it was nearly full. Cleaning the drive with CCleaner caused it to go from less than 100 MB free to over 10 GB free! Yes, these features that you think are nearly worthless, ha, but I have seen really messed up computers that have been abused, & through hell. I work on a lot of them, so I have seen well, things that are mind boggling.

Yes, this is a problem!

I feel lazy here. Do you mean edit the Defraggler executable? Or do you mean editing some other EXE for patching? I believe you mean Defraggler, right? Edit Defraggler.exe?

It didn't seem to take the picture the first time I tried. So I just waited & resubmitted them. If you do the file based defrag, then drag the top title bar (sometimes you need to move defraggler out of the way), then it will move the defraggler pause buttons that pop up. But they do not follow defraggler, they go clear across the screen, disappear, & do not seem to come back till you stop/restart the defrag process! This happens in XP, Vista, or Windows 7.

Defraggler is a cool tool, but it has a bad bug. If you go to defrag, select the files to defrag, then click defrag & a window will pop up with pause/stop etc. But if you drag the top window of Defraggler, the little box is happy to move all over your screen, or even off the screen, never to be found again. How confusing to lose your controls, simply because you dragged Defraggler around the screen by it's title bar! See it in action with the pics I am including! Pic 1 shows a normal Defraggler session, while 2 shows the magical moving box!

There is always the simple Startup Folder (drag shortcut to startup folder on start menu... So easy, so fast! Even though it is easy, I still like the idea of adding it to CCleaner!

That depends. I have 2 GB ram, & have had up to 2.5 Gb on mine. Right now though, 2 GB. I found 1 to be inadequate. I did have slowdowns with 1 GB. As I used Firefox, when I opened 30, 40, 200 tabs in Firefox, I noted that I was running out of mem, & the comp went to virtual ram on the harddisk. No, sometimes 1 GB is not enough. If you do video editing, use hundreds of tabs in firefox (I had up to 1,611 tabs open before) then yes, yes, yes, you do need more ram. To some, this seems like an excessive amount of tabs, but here is why I do it. Speed, speed, speed. When downloading pics from sites like interfacelift.com website (yes, I mass download), it saves so much time to open them in new tabs in the reso you want, then save them. (Right click T for new tab, visit the tabs, save the pics, CTRL + W to close tabs. Yes, it saves time! Also do it for downloading from freewarefiles! I do need more than 1 GB ram, because I have to have firefox open for research, downloads, in addition to helping others find things, working on computers (external defrags, virus & malware scans, data recovery, you name it). I have to have a fast comp + fast lots of ram, & I do use it all, nearly max out 2 GB at times!

If this proves to be too much, what about a way to search through the results that the registry cleaner finds? Would be really helpful, in the event of CCleaner finding hundreds of entries, say, if a lot of the ones you want to remove old program files related, or named something like symantec. This way, you can eliminate "all but" the entries with the name you select, or whatever. Would make reg editing/deletion easier, right? Kind of like it does now with searching through your program uninstaller, & you start typing... It finds as you type to eliminate all the others for easier use/deletion... Was wondering about adding a find as you type to search through the results that the reg cleaner finds. It can be a real chore, otherwise, to sort through hundreds or thousands of entries that reg cleaner in ccleaner finds on the occasion that you do have to run it, so, at least having a find as you type... Ahhhhh, spare me the agony! Heh! Anyone else think this would work?

Sounds good, but the problem is that some folders are empty that serve a purpose. I create empty folders to use when dumping files into a different folder, or testing things out, etc. If CCleaner deleted those, I would have to recreate them. Additionally, the startup folder in the start menu is sometimes an "empty" folder, as is the My Documents, My Pictures, etc. I cannot begin to describe the mayhem CCleaner would cause if it started deleting folders because they are "empty". Sounds like a good idea, but because of what I stated above, I have to thumbs down this idea.

Ram WILL make a difference. Processor speed makes a difference, but the importance of ram cannot be overstated enough. If you run out of RAM & the PC switches to paging to the harddisk, it is a LOOOOOTTTT slower. Make a computer go from a rabbit to a snail. Yes, Ram is important. So is the processor. Adding a startup adder, well, I didn't think of that, but it does sound like something useful, so I give it a thumbs up. Why include a startup manager if it isn't a complete one?

That is very interesting, Hazel. When a program stores license keys in the registry, or when it stores data for running a program, it is usually stored in either HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/(Software title here), or the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/(Software title here) sections of the registry. Occasionally, it may also be stored in other places as well. Not all registry keys are required for programs to function, as some are simply last used program lists, or other rubbish that can be safely ignored. In this case, having the ability to search the registry with CCleaner would be so awesome. I hate how Symantec Antivirus (Norton) leaves hundreds of reg keys after an uninstall. I uninstalled a 2006 version recently for someone, to update to a newer client. Running the uninstaller for Norton, Norton Live Updater, etc, etc, & rebooting still left norton files in the %Appdata% folder, in addition to the program files/common files folder. Not a problem. But what was a problem, was the reg entries. Had to manually find each one, then delete. Would have been so much easier to be able to search them all in the registry, then just sort through the list & clickmark the ones to remove. As it was, took long enough to remove the keys needed, so that Sym Remover would run to finish the cleanup (instead of complaining that there is a 2009 sym product, when it was a 2006 version! I got their machine fixed, but, man, it would be so much easier with a reg scanner program that can search for specified key terms, or have a custom field a user can click, along with a caution when doing this, if you'd like. Have any of you all ever run into this?

Let me suggest this then. If not that, at least provide a way to filter all registry keys that it would normally find so that it only shows symantec, or whatever key you are looking for. Filtering would be cool, but it would still not be as powerful as searching. Find as you type would be good for drilling through results as well. Find as you type + filtering would definitely rock, though not as hard as being able to search for, & locate keys to remove. Additionally, you mention that it is a perfect idea to destroy the integrity of the registry. That may be so, but then why have a registry cleaner in the first place? Even without my idea, it is very easy to see that running a registry cleaner can destroy a machine over time. For instance. Someone installs KM Player, & it takes over as default MP3 player. They remove the player later, & the .MP3 extension is left with no program associated with it. Guess what CCleaner Reg Cleaner would suggest as an unused extension that is safe to remove? Uh, oh! .MP3 is safe to remove, in fact, it is no longer needed because nothing is associated with it! Given this kind of ease in breaking things, do we need a registry cleaner? But the truth is, you get in sticky situations sometimes. I have faith in CCleaner, developers, so I can only hope they put as much faith in us in return. For everyone knows, or should know, that any time you add a registry cleaner, it is dangerous. I was merely requesting something that I feel would greatly enhance it...