nukecad

Just reinstall CCleaner if you still have the installer, if you didn't keep the installer then simply install CCleaner Free. Then reactivate it to Pro - Options>About>Upgrade to Pro> enter key>Register. https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/204043844-How-to-register-and-activate-CCleaner-Professional#how-to-register-and-activate-ccleaner-professional-0-0 If you need to download a new installer then it's easiest to find the latest one here: https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/builds As it's the same machine then it will not use an additional entitlement, so you'll still have the others to use on other machines. PS. As far as I know 5 computer licences are no longer sold, (although there may still be some old ones about on retailers shelves?), 3PCs and/or Macs is the norm for a Pro Plus licence. https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028350711-How-many-computers-can-I-install-CCleaner-Professional-Plus-on-#how-many-computers-can-i-install-ccleaner-professional-plus-on--0-0

What size is the SSD? Modern SSDs 'overprovision' as standard, but you should still leave 10% of the capacity free for Trim and Garbage Collection to work with. From what you say I suspect that maybe there wasn't that much free so optimising reached the limit? I leave it to Windows to optimise my new SSD. Windows can/will also defragment an SSD, but only when it's needed and it's a special type of defragmentation. It's a bit of a complicated subject, you can find it explained here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/the-real-and-complete-story-does-windows-defragment-your-ssd SSDs should clean themselves up, but if Trim isn't enabled and/or if Active Garbage Collection isn't triggering because the SSD is always in use then it may not be happining. In such a case Crucial recommend that you boot into UEFI/BIOS and leave the computer sat in that state for a number of hours. That allows the SSD's Garbage Collection to be triggered and do its job because nothing is being read from or written to it. All SSDs have Garbage Collection so that tip applies. https://uk.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-ssd/ssd-used-to-be-faster-but-has-slowed-down

Actually Norton now ultimately own CCleaner, they bought out Avast. (Well the press says they merged, but Norton paid money for all of Avast's shares which looks like a buyout to most people). https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/11/22619667/nortonlifelock-avast-merger-deal-anti-virus-cyber-security-software As long as you are personally happy with your installs then that's your choice. The advice above still stands though; as long as you continue to use end-of-life Windows versions, and out-of-date software. your system will not be as safe/secure/clean as it should be. We can't force anybody to change their ways. But you should look carefully at what you are doing, both for yourself and particularly with what you are going to be giving an old person to use.

Yes the Win 7 installer. There are known compromised ones out there to catch the unwary. The fact that you are seeing this strange language issue when nobody else is, and only seeing it on one machine, points to something being odd on that particular machine. if more CCleaner users were seeing it then that would be different, but nobody except yourself is reporting it. It's certainly not happening on my machines. As Hazelnut says the CCleaner backdooring in 2017 was a different thing. Yes it did oringinate in China, but they were not interested in home users, as the zdnet article that you linked tells you they were after the big tech companies. To try and steal their development secrets, Which also tells you that those big tech companies were all using CCleaner, and they still do. If CCleaner wasn't so widely used then the Chinese hackers wouldn't have bothered attacking it. They also attacked and compromised Teamviewer, another very widely used app, in a similar way in 2016. If you did happen to get the tainted CCleaner installer (and it's freely admitted that most users did get it, I've still got a copy of it) then all it did was check if the computer was at one of the targeted companies and was it connected to their internal network, if so it reported back to the hackers that they had found a target, If you weren't at one of those companies then it did nothing. Only about 40 machines at those big companies actually got a second stage hack, but nothing got stolen. (As far as anyone knows). The point is that as it is known that Chinese state sponsored hackers are widely active then anything unusual 'chinese' that shows up on a machine has to be regarded as possibly suspicious. Especially if it turns up on a Windows OS that is end-of-life and so no longer getting security updates, both XP and 7 are EOL. https://www.techadvisor.com/news/windows/windows-7-2021-dangerous-3807335/

All the best:

It can take a long time to wipe free space on a 1TB drive. It's a consequence of todays bigger drives, anything that needs to read or write the whole drive is going to take longer because there is more to do. eg. Consolidation defragmenting, chkdsk, some virus scans, etc. Especially if it's an external drive connected by USB, and especially if you are using Drive Wiper to wipe the entire drive which will delete any data on it and then wipe it. (You can't do an entire wipe on your system drive, for obvious reasons). I always ignore the estimated time remaining, or percentage completed, in any app and even Windows Updates. It's usually wildly out and you often see them suddenly drop from hours remaining to completed. A relevant question is how many wipe passes have you specified? 1-pass is sufficent, more than one is not needed and just takes longer, ie. if you specify 35 passes then it's going to take 35 times longer than one pass. (The multi-pass options are not needed these days, they are just still there for the paranoid who ask for them back if they are removed).

That only happens the first time after you install, and you can simply ignore it and instead go to Options>About and ste the CCleaner Home Screen to Custom Clean. You need never use Health Check unless you click on it. (Although it may be better, simpler, to use for a 92 yo who is not tech savy). OK enough of that. We can warn you until we are blue in the face that CCleaner 5.27 is way too old to be cleaning your machines properly. (Even the old XP machine should be using CCleaner 5.64). But we can't force you, if you want to be stubborn about it even despite knowing that 5.27 will not be cleaning your machines properly then that's your personal choice. (Although TBH I don't see that you should force that choice on another person, your 92 yo). The Chinese thing is something else, nobody else is reporting anything like that so it seems to be just that machine. There is just a slight worry that you may have got a modified/infected version of Windows 7 from somewhere. Back-doored Win 7 installers do exist out there. See this thread at Bleepingcomputer which also gives a link to a trusted download site for Win 7 ISOs (Digital River): https://www.w7forums.com/threads/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-image-downloads.12325/page-2#post-124821 Do you realy want to be reponsible for giving a 92 yo a machine that may be infected with Chinese spyware or worse? (And if it's hidden in a modified Windows System installer itself then an Antivirus?Antimalware may not see it even after the install).

You still haven't answered the question of just where you got that Win 7 installer from? Would you like to give us the URL?

As I hinted above - where did you get the Windows 7 installer from? You could have a bigger problem here than just with the CCleaner install. Yes the very old 5.27 installer is not picking up the Chinese system install. But if the latest CCleaner standard installer is seeing it as Chinese Win 7 then no doubt other apps will also see it as Chinese Win 7. That is not going to make your 92 y/o happy if/when they try to install something else. (Or if you.have given him a system with a compromised/virused Win 7).

Once you have used Disk Clean-up try CCleaner again, it usually runs alright then. You say it seems to get stuck about the 'quarter way' mark. If You are using Custom Clean it should tell you underneath that bar what file, or at least what section it is stuck on. I suspect it will be one of the Internet Explorer or Edge sections if it's only quarter way. You could try unticking the cleaning for each of those in turn and then cleaning with it unticked to see which is the problem. Takes a bit of time to do each one in turn, but testing does take time. Mine used to always take ages on the IE 'History' and as I never used IE it never had any history so I simply unticked it. Note that you should have 'Temporary Internet Files' and 'Cookies' ticked for IE even if you never use it, other things still use those two locations for temporary files.

Health Check does not use any of the cleaning options such as cookies to keep, ticks/unticks or Includes/Excludes. It always uses it's own cleaning rules. It's a simple to use basic clean meant for those who can't be bothered, or don't know how, to set up the any customisation. And who aren't realy bothered about the details of what it cleans. (That's why the language it uses can seem a bit simple or even patronising). There are a few things you can do after the analyze step, but not very much. Cookies to keep, ticks/unticks and Includes/Excludes are for Custom Clean, which as the name says can be customised to clean/not clean things as you prefer. Custom Clean shows you more details of what it has analyzed and/or cleaned. You can even set the level of detail that it shows you. If you could customise Health Check in the same way then it would be no different from Custom Clean, so there would be little point in having both. (Some of us have even argued that Health Check should be a seperate app to avoid any confusion, but we don't have much say in those kinds of decision).

You have a corrupted recycle bin - it's pretty common and easy to fix. One part of Windows thinks there is stuff still in the bin even though it's empty If you don't fix it then Windows will just keep thinking it's not been emptied and the list of deleted files just keeps growing bigger. See here for the fix: https://community.ccleaner.com/topic/60979-empty-recycle-bin-skipped-files/?tab=comments#comment-331053 PS. Most people don't even notice when their bin is corrupted, it's only when you use something like CCleaner that you can see the problem. That's probably why Microsoft have never got round to making sure it stops happening, it's just a minor glitch.

If you can't get into Windows at all to repair it, and you do seem to have tried most things you can, then it does look like clean reinstall time. You might want to wait a bit though to see if anyone has other suggestions of what to try. Hopefully you have your files etc. backed up. My personal advice, although it's a bit late for you now - Don't trust any automatic driver updater. They can only look if there is a later version of the drivers that you already have, they can't tell if any later version is compatible with your particular machine or not, all machines are different. Many times it will be OK, nobody posts about that because they don't have a complaint, but too many times it can break things as you can see in this sub-forum. (My personal view is that even if it's only 1 in a thousand that goes wrong that's still too many). PS. It probably was an Nvidia driver update that caused the problem, all the recent Windows 10 versions have had constant problems with Nvidia drivers. Google 'Windows 10 Nvidia problems' and you will see lots.

It's not clear from that post if you want to set Simplified Chinese as the language, or if it's already set as Chinese and you want to change it? (If it's automatically setting Chinese during the install you may want to investigate your Windows settings). In Options>Language you should be able to just click on the language you want from the list and CCleaner will change it straightaway. If for some reason you can't change it that way then you should be able to set the language CCleaner uses this way: Do another install of CCleaner but this time use the 'Slim' installer, 3rd one down from here, and you can set the language during the install. https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/builds PS. Whilst you are on the builds page you may want to download the 'Sunset' installer for your XP machine. That gives you the last CCleaner version that is compatible with Vista and XP (v5.64). PPS. That's why you don't get update notifications on Vista or XP, you can't update CCleaner on them to above 5.64.

As it's a new install I'm assuming it's Windows 10 21H2, and CCleaner v5.88. How far into the cleaning is it getting? It should tell you at the top of the results panel what Custom Clean is currently cleaning, which should give you a clue where it is getting stuck. One thing you can try if CCleaner is freezing is to run the Windows built in Disk Clean-up, Just open the Start menu and start typing Disk Clean-up and it will bring it up for you. Select run it as Administrator and after it does it's first scan select 'Clean up system files' and let it scan again, then clean what it has found. That does take a lot longer than using CCleaner, but can sometimes clear blockages.

Probably due to those youtube and news entries then, both of those can be heavy on the junk and fill up the browser caches. You might want to check your browser options, especially for what '3rd party' options you have allowed. It's also sometimes a good idea to run Windows built in' Disk Clean-up' that will often clean up things that CCleaner may be getting stuck on. Many of us run it once a week using the 'Clean up system files' option, just to make sure nothing stubborn is blocking things. It does take a lot longer than running CCleaner, it can take up to 20 minutes to clear Windows Update files, (which is one reason you use CCleaner instead), but if CCleaner is taking a lot of time anyway it could help.

I know what you mean. Many app installs now have a pre-selected tickbox for if you want a desktop shortcut or not, untick it and you won't get one. But most still do it as standard and don't give you a choice about it. As you say if you don't want a shortcut on the desktop then you have to delete the shortcut yourself. Only you can know/decide which you want it on the desktop or not. You could delete all desktop shortcuts at a stroke quite easily, but it would upset a lot of people if CCleaner let them do that by mistake.

The logged in status is usually saved in "session" for the browser so make sure that is ticked if using Custom Clean. Alternatively using Health Check should always clear the session. However there do seem to be some recent changes to Chrome cookies that CCleaner hasn't caught up with yet. So if those particular ones are cookies then they may not be being cleared at the moment. Edit- I'd also check Chrome itself to see if 'Allow extensions to run in the background after closing' (something like that wording) has been enabled. That would also prevent cleaning of some things.

I see that thinking, but winapp2 wouldn't normaly clean what CCleaner already cleans as standard, there wouldn't be much point in doing it twice. So you may be missing anything in CCleaner as standard that has changed since your old version.

It sounds as if they may be Flash cookies rather than 'normal' cookies, Flash cookies are different so may not show in the Cookies listing. See if these two help, the first is about normal cookies and the second about Flash cookies on a Mac: https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048436231-Select-cookies-that-you-don-t-want-to-clean-on-CCleaner-for-Mac#select-cookies-that-you-don-t-want-to-clean-on-ccleaner-for-mac-0-0 https://support.piriform.com/hc/en-us/articles/360048436191

Are you saying that Custom Clean is finding cookies even though they aren't listed in the 'Cookies on computer'? I'm not sure why that would be, (maybe Safari, maybe something to do with Mac?), but there's another way you should be able to select cookies to keep. If you do an Analyze and then double click on the 'Safari -Cookies' it will show a list of what cookies it found to clean. If you want to keep any you can then right click on its name and 'Add to Exclude list'.

You might want to check if your email has been compromised, there's a free checker at haveIbeedpwned. https://haveibeenpwned.com/ There is a password checker as well to check if anybody has your passwords. https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords They have just had a big update with 225 million new compromised emails and passwords that have been donated by the UK police: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-59730010

Yes, I suspect that Annony2000s issue is going to be syncing , browser preloading, or allow extensions to run in the background after the browser is closed.

See my reply in the post you made in the winapp2 thread.

5.40 is a very old version now so will not be up to date with changes to any browser (and browsers do change a lot, Firefox has had 3 updates this week). You should update your CCleaner to the latest version which is v5.88. (Unless you have Windows Vista or XP, the latest they will support is CCleaner 5.64) However from other posts it does seem that something has recently changed in where Chrome stores cookies, and CCleaner will need to be updated again to keep up with those Chrome changes. But one more question - have you recently sycnced your Chrome? If your browser is synced then that syncing will put cookies etc. straight back from the cloud after CCleaner has removed them from your machine