Dave CCleaner

... and clean the vents. This goes double if you have pets. On one occasion, having left things too long, the amount of hair inside my keyboard and CPU made it seem like my cat was trying to use home technology to clone itself.

Although that error message opens with "The name you have entered does not match your licence key" the rest of the text ("Please re-enter the name exactly as it was submitting at the time of purchase" gives the suggestion that the issue is with entering the name incorrectly - which can lead people down a rabbit hole of trying to retype their name when the issue is often that there is a mismatch with the licence key (typing a "1" instead of an "I", S/5, Z/2, A/4, etc). As per the link helpfully provided above, copy/pasting is strongly recommended.

Note that those are not ads. The example you gave was of a loyalty discount offer in a renewal reminder related to your subscription because you are coming up to expiry at some point in the near future. From a couple of months before expiry you'd be getting a reminder about every 2 weeks - although when there is a special limited-time promotional discount available you may get 3-4 in the space of a week. If you are receiving renewal reminders more frequently than this, then (unless you are very close to your expiry date) the most common source of such overmessaging is if you have accidentally configured CCleaner to wipe the "I have already seen this message and I don't need to see it again" flag as a result of removing too many things from the cookie cleaning whitelist. The fix for this is to go to Options > Cookies in the CCleaner console, right click in "Cookies to Keep", select Import and import the cookies.txt attached here - which should resolve that problem for you. cookies.txt If you are getting other notifications relating to CCleaner having found something to clean that you don't want to be notified about, that is configurable through Options > Smart Cleaning. Those privacy settings relate to data processing rather than notifications, per se. That said, a few times a year we may offer discounts on CCleaner Professional to free users (usually as 1-3 notifications per campaign, depending on how long it is running for), and those who uncheck that "See possible upgrades and offers for our other products by sharing app-usage data with us" will generally not see most of these. If you are in the US, Piriform has not changed the price for a 1 PC licence of CCleaner Professional from US$25 since it first went on sale ~10 years ago. For users with multiple PCs, the CCleaner Professional Plus bundle for $40 was boosted to support up to 3 PCs back in May 2019. We understand that not all of our users can afford CCleaner Professional, which is why we have an ongoing commitment to always offer a free version of CCleaner, along with our other performance and privacy tools.

Has everything gone from the folders installed under c:/program files? Or are some files refusing to delete because they are in use? You may need to use CCleaner Tools > Startup to kill off any start-up items related to that CD if so, before resuming folder deletion. Running the a Custom Clean may get rid of any temporary files that it has left clogging up space. And, given the age of the software that you installed, this may be an appropriate time for judicious use of the Registry Cleaner (I did this just this morning to remove some stubborn traces of RealPlayer that its uninstaller had left behind).

That version of CCleaner is from 2016 and is more than 4 years old (https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/version-history). At the time, the latest version of Chrome was 53.0.2785 and the latest versions of Chrome that are in circulation are 88.0.4324 and 89.0.4389. One of the reasons that CCleaner gets updated so often is compatibility with the changes made in new browser versions. If you have updated Chrome at any point in the past 4 years then you probably need to update your CCleaner.

Case in point: A video downloader for Facebook and Instagram photo downloader with malicious intent https://decoded.avast.io/janvojtesek/backdoored-browser-extensions-hid-malicious-traffic-in-analytics-requests/ (technical analysis). This is one of the reasons why CCleaner Browser is a little more resistant to random browser extension installation. While CCleaner itself does not currently do reputational analysis on browser extensions, it does have a handy tool to review what plugins you currently have installed (Tools > Browser Plugins). We'd recommend removing anything that you may have loaded up a while ago and aren't using. CCleaner gives you a quick way to review, disable or delete browser extensions all in the one place - or you can do it manually the slow way as per https://www.ccleaner.com/knowledge/how-to-disable-or-remove-browser-extensions

... one of the main reasons being that the paid AV industry has been telling everyone that with free AV "you get what you pay for". But one might conclude that they have an ulterior motive for propagating that perception The reality is that free AV brands often outperform paid AVs in independent testing. In recent years Avast won the "top rated" protection from the industry bible AV-Comparatives in 2020, 2019, 2017 and 2015 (https://www.av-comparatives.org/awards/avast/). AVG won in 2019 and 2018 (https://www.av-comparatives.org/awards/avg/). And the free offerings from Kaspersky and Bitdefender tend to stack up pretty well too. A recent review of the free AV landscape can be found here: https://uk.pcmag.com/antivirus/120817/the-best-free-antivirus-protection So how is this possible? The business model for companies whose core offering is a free AV (Avast/AVG/Avira/etc) is the same as the business model that we have here at CCleaner - build a free product that provides value to customers such that everyone will want to use it, and the money comes in from a percentage of customers who see sufficient value to upgrade to premium features. Most people never buy, but a small percentage that do out of hundreds of millions of users starts to add up - and there aren't any channel partners asking for their share of the pie. On the other hand, companies whose core offering is a paid product may see more cash coming in the door, but most of that has to go the retailers and OEM partners that they pay to sell their software for them. Free software companies don't have those costs and can use the savings to pump more investment into making their products better instead.

This pops up every now and then and usually relates to synchronising with the subscription attached to a customer's Google Play account on a new phone. More information is available here CCleaner for Android - Premium Features

I was clearing viruses off Macs with Virex back in the 90s, when the primary infection vector was shareware floppies. Macs have never had the market share to make them an attractive target for most for-profit malware authors, but since generally speaking Mac owners have more money than PC owners they do present a lucrative niche for phishing, identity theft and keyloggers. Nothing I have seen in the past 15 years would suggest that it will.

@mmm mmmm mmm Have you updated to CCleaner 5.77 yet? This was noted as one of the bugfixes in this release: https://www.ccleaner.com/knowledge/ccleaner-v5778448 ("Fixed a bug where the license information could be reset and lost").

Just to confirm, how long before you posted this message was this screenshot taken? I believe there were some issues with the update server at launch (about 11 hours ago) but those seem to have been sorted out shortly (about 20 minutes) thereafter. If you click on "check for updates" in the bottom right hand corner of the console does it still tell you the same thing?

Indeed. Can't retrospectively bugfix the older versions Also correct. As mentioned previously, there's few things to unpick around how we might best approach this, so the best solution for portable users would be, as you say, to switch off the automatic updates and stick with your previous practice of manual downloads.

Depending on the path you use to update, you may be asked along the way if you wish to upgrade to CCleaner Professional, eg: If you wish simply to update then you can nope your way through that screen and continue.

@Gregarious Greg: If you were simply updating a free version of CCleaner from an older version to a newer version then no licence key should be required. You update and continue merrily on your way. Can I confirm the version number of CCleaner you were using prior to updating? Did you go from 5.76 to 5.77, or from an earlier version? Also, were you on CCleaner Professional before, a CCleaner trial or CCleaner Free? Did you take the update from inside the product, or did you go to the website to download the updated version? If you are on CCleaner Free, ie: ... what is in your C:\Program Files\CCleaner directory? It should look something like this? Specifically, with no branding.dll or ccleaner.dat files in there:

@alejack12001: are you referring to the automatic browser cleaning? What have you set as your preferred rules under Options > Smart Cleaning? Additional note: It seems that @nukecad and I answered this at the same time. Read his response - it is much more informative.

... or to update to 5.77 which has the bugfix.

Short answer: no. While we feel that the ad blocking, anti-fingerprinting, memory-saving and battery saving features of the CCleaner Browser are extremely useful, surprising all of our users with an unexpected download would not be the best way to get them to try it. Wouldn't be great for our download server traffic bill either Under the Privacy section of Health Check, after a scan you may see a suggestion to try CCleaner Browser, eg: And after you update CCleaner it may also suggest itself: Aside from that you can download it from the CCleaner website from https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/browser

That installation option screen seems to be missing some graphical elements, which is odd. I don't think I have seen that before. It should look more like this: The second snapshot with the blank screen - was that what you saw after you clicked on install? If so then note that CCleaner loads some of the UI content from a server, and a blank screen on this second step is usually a sign that you have got CCleaner's network access blocked (either via a firewall rule or some 0.0.0.0ing in the hosts file). A sort-of-work-around for network-related blockages in the installer is to use the "slim build" instead (https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/builds) although it is important to note that will simply defer the problem from installation to operation if the issue does indeed relate to connectivity.

CCleaner removes cookies and temp files but does not inspect or touch the actual contents of files. If you have overwritten one of your Excel files somehow and you had it stored on OneDrive you may be able to recover the previous version with a right-click > version history > restore. If you are trying to recover deleted files from your local hard drive I would recommend Recuva - available as a free download from https://www.ccleaner.com/recuva.

For your privacy, please do not post personal information in a public forum - especially not details relating to your licence key and subscription. Para su privacidad, no publique información personal en un foro público, especialmente los detalles relacionados con su clave de licencia y suscripción. There is a guide on how to register your licence key for CCleaner Professional here: How to register and activate CCleaner Professional – Piriform Support. Although currently this article is only in English, you can see a Spanish version here: Cómo registrarse y activar CCleaner Professional. If you need further assistance, you can contact customer support at support@ccleaner.com. Hay una guía sobre cómo registrar su clave de licencia para CCleaner Professional aquí: How to register and activate CCleaner Professional – Piriform Support. Aunque actualmente este artículo está solo en inglés, puedes ver una versión en español aquí: Cómo registrarse y activar CCleaner Professional. Si necesita más ayuda, puede ponerse en contacto con el servicio de atención al cliente en support@ccleaner.com.

Cleaning up the registry may still have merit for our users on Windows 7 and below. The use case for the registry cleaner on Windows 10 is if: You have a specific problem that you are trying to resolve; or You are trying to locate and/or shred leftover registry entries from a specific piece of software that you have uninstalled from your computer When we next have a major UI refresh, the registry cleaner will likely be moving under the Tools menu to reflect that: Registry cleaning is a specific tool for a specific purpose - and not something for the regular day-to-day to-do list for most users; and It will hopefully stop people classifying CCleaner as a registry cleaner (since it has been several years since that has been anything other than an ancillary function)

Also, if you have mislaid the licence key that you would have received by email after completing your order with Cleverbridge, you can retrieve it from CCleaner.com - License Lookup using the email address that you used when you purchased. Note that customers who purchase a licence key from us and then forget to use it to activation CCleaner Professional will usually get a number of registration remainder emails from us at some point afterwards that will also contain your registration information.

If you complete a purchase and do not receive an email, that can mean that you input the wrong email address when purchasing. If you do get a "thankyou for your order" email but with no licence key inside then that usually means that you have not yet completed the payment - particularly if you have purchased via PayPal. Check the order confirmation email and see if it contains text something like this, starting with "Still need to submit your PayPal payment?": If so, then you still need to complete your payment authorisation with PayPal. Press that green button to log into PayPal and complete your purchase. There will also be an option lower down in the email to change your payment method. Please note that: We cannot release the licence key until payment has been completed. If you have a credit card linked to your PayPal account then PayPal (not us) may have placed a hold on funds in anticipation of your completing your purchase. This is not a charge amount, is not from us, and will not result in any double-billing once PayPal releases the hold. @inbuon: I can confirm that as of the time of writing, your order still shows as "Awaiting Offline Payment". So you will need to complete the steps above to complete your order and receive your licence key:

While we did have higher customer support volume than usual last week due to a sales promotion that was running, I checked and there are no unanswered priority customer support tickets that old. When you contacted customer support you would have received a receipt that would have mentioned that: If you have an active paid CCleaner subscription, priority support means that we make every effort to prioritize your email requests and queries. It's a benefit that's not available to the free users of our products. And that: If you are a paid CCleaner subscriber, all you need to do is reply to this email with your Cleverbridge order reference number. For customers of CCleaner for Android, this would be your GPA order number from your purchase via the Google Play app store. Providing us with these details helps us identify you, making it easier to get back to you as quickly as possible. Did you respond to this identifying yourself as a paying customer of CCleaner Android? Or did you leave yourself as anonymous? With regards to your photos: Were you using Google Photos to back up your photos? What phone model are you using, and what version of Android? What you ran the compression, did you keep them as JPG or did you change the file format to HEIC? HEIC is more efficient, but not currently well supported outside of the Apple/iOS space. Did you keep the default option to keep the originals, or elect to delete the originals? For the photos that you say are reported as "invalid photo format" by WhatsApp, etc - are you able to open them in Google Photos or your device's default "gallery" app? If not, you should also be able to locate them using your device's file manager. When you check the image properties, what does it show the file size, photo resolution and file type as - eg: are the file names still .jpg? Has the filename had "_optimized" added to it? If the files you are trying to send are 0 bytes and don't have the word "_optimized" in the file name then it sounds like you are trying to send some temp files left over from the compression process, rather than the actual photos themselves. Also, if the files you are trying to send are extremely small and excessively pixellated then it sounds like you may be trying to send the thumbnail previews instead of the photos themselves.

That sounds like it would be accomplished via secure://settings/passwords (or settings > passwords from the threedots menu), clicking on the threedots next to the Saved Passwords heading and then clicking "Export passwords" Is that what you had in mind?