Dave CCleaner

Odd. After a couple of million installations I would have thought that Norton would be a bit beyond "fewer than 5 users" by now for version 5.59 Software Updater should also not be too novel for Norton either - it was officially launched back in version 5.55 over 3 months ago.

CCleaner has had third party offers in the installer since 2010 to help subsidise the free distribution. Avast was added into the mix in 2017. It doesn't appear for every user every time, but when it does there is an opt-out option:

https://www.ccleaner.com/support/license-lookup

Looks like Dr Web has fixed at their end already for 5.59 - are you able to update without problems now?

I hope you never need it, but just in case if you ever overdo it with the photo deletion, the CCleaner Profession Plus bundle also includes a paid licence for the Recuva file recovery software.

@Dean Anderson I just checked your details. Your CCleaner Professional Plus licence key is valid and works - I just tried it myself personally and it activated perfectly. Note that this licence is for PCs (not Macs). You can enter it in here. You'll need to put in your name (case sensitive and not email address) and usually safest to copy-paste your licence key - common issue is manually transcribing the letter "Z" as the number "2", the number "1" as the letter "I", etc.

Could you clarify what you are trying to do? Are you trying to recover a lost licence key, or to enter your licence key into the product after downloading it?

If you are a paid user then, depending on how you updated, your licence information should have been copied across automatically. You can check here:

This topic seems to have conflated the two separate matters of licence key validity and expiry. I was addressing the key validity matter for folks who were saying that their keys weren't accepted by the product. Aside from entry errors (and occasional bugs), a validly issued home user key that hasn't been cancelled for egregious licence infringement will be accepted by the product. If it has expired, then your licence information box will tell you that it has expired, but you can still enter it into the product. Back to the topic of the semi-mythical "lifetime licence". CCleaner has never advertised the paid CCleaner Professional product as being a "lifetime licence" and has never issued perpetual serial keys with no end date for home users. Every serial key ever issued was generated with an expiry date - usually 12 months from the date of creation, as the licensing system was built many years ago with only direct online sales in mind. Naturally that wasn't going to work to well physical distribution, so to work around the fact that retail boxes can sit in a warehouse or on a shelf for a while, when serial keys were issued for retail manufacturing in 2013-2015 these were created with a longer period - usually 18 or 24 months from the date of creation. Extra time if you picked one up hot off the presses, but less so if you picked up old stock. There are two ways to buy software: By version, where you can keep using the version that you purchased for as long as you want but you then need to pay again if you want to update to a new version for new features. This will often come with a period of customer support and, to avoid frustration on the part of customers who have purchased just before a new version is released, often an "assurance period" where you can update for free to the latest version for a limited period of time. By subscription, where you can only use the software while the subscription is active, but ongoing customer support and all updates are included as part of the package. If you bought CCleaner Professional between 2012 and 2017 then that was under the first model - by version. So if you bought CCleaner v4.04 back in July of 2013, for example, then you were entitled to keep using that version for as long as you wanted and also to get 12 months of priority support and 12 months of free updates - up until the July 2014 release of version 4.16; if you bought CCleaner v5.17 in April 2016 then you were entitled to updates up to the April 2017 release of version 5.29; etc (see https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/version-history for a list of versions and dates going back to mid-2008). But as you would have noticed, we've been letting customers update well past the end of their version entitlement. A bit of background on that ... Prior to 2011, CCleaner was donation-ware - for home users there was only a free version available, which was updated on a regular basis. From 2005 if you donated more than $20 you got a warm feeling of funding the continuing development of CCleaner, and as a bonus you also got the new releases before everyone else. In 2011 CCleaner introduced more formal paid licences for home users - while the software itself was still the same as the free product, for $24.95 you'd get a year of premium priority customer support. If you didn't renew your subscription, then the premium priority support would end after a year. The subscription was later expanded to add additional value with the inclusion of a year of automatic software updates, and later in 2013 additional "Pro" features for paid users started to be added. But this created a bit of an awkward situation - the addition of those Pro features added extra value for the paying customers, but also made things a little untidy if a customer didn't renew. While a free user could update to the latest free version at any time from the website, a paid user who didn't renew was no longer eligible for updates and was stuck on their current version if they wanted to continue to use the Pro features - the only way that they could update to the latest version was if they reverted to the free software. On one hand, we wanted everyone to get the latest and greatest version, but on the other hand we figured that users who had bought the Professional version for the additional features wouldn't want to relinquish them. Mixing the two models by selling version-based software, but with a subscription layer on top had created an holy mess - so CCleaner basically ignored the fact that a subscription had expired, and allowed those expired users to continue to update (reserving the right to enforce free upgrade limits at some point in the future) assuming that we'd eventually figure a way to sort it all out in an equitable fashion and that in the meantime no-one would be likely to complain about getting more updates than they'd technically paid for. To give us a cleaner path forward, in 2018 CCleaner started selling CCleaner Professional under a subscription model - which unifies all of the entitlements into a much tidier package. For customers who bought by version prior to that and have not transferred to the subscription model, your product still works, but the 12 months of support and free updates have most certainly expired. As at the time of writing, for expired home users who bought by version: You can still contact Piriform customer support - although you will no longer be in the priority handling queue Automatic updates may still function - but may cease at any time Manual updates and reinstalls to the latest release will still work - however at some point in the not-too-distant future we will probably be announcing a "sunset" release for version-based customers which will be the latest release that users who have elected to remain on the "by version" model will be able to update to, with additional updates past that point requiring a switch to subscription licensing. All things considered, requiring a "last officially entitled version" rollback for version-licensed customers who have been updating past their free update entitlement expiry date is highly unlikely. Most likely outcome is that entitlement (at least for manual updates) will be grandfathered up to any "sunset release". In a similar manner, the availability of the various "Pro" features within the product released after your expiry date will also be grandfathered up to a certain point - at least for those features released prior to the commencement of the subscription model. TBD for Pro features released in 2019 and beyond (such as Software Updater). No - nothing that you bought is being taken away. Yes, your product will say that the 12 month subscription component has expired - because it has. Yes, if you are a home user you can continue to use the product - subject to the limitations mentioned above.

Actually no. No changes have been made to his account at any point. His issue was that the key he entered was not accepted as valid. Since it was a validly issued key which had not been cancelled for piracy, all he had to do was try again for it to work. And he did. Previous attempts may have been a mistranscription of a printed serial key or there may have been some error connecting to the licensing server at the time. This topic seems to be conflating a number of separate issues. I have been addressing the matter of serial key validity. To avoid further confusion, I'll talk about serial key expiry in a separate response.

The pirates who posted the 245 246 eBay listings that we have shut down over the past 3 months would probably have a different view on the matter to you. The international game of whack-a-mole required for other websites requires a little longer to jump through various hoops, but we have about a half dozen domains working their way through the take-down queue at the moment.

Eset (and anyone whitelabelling them) used to get a bit prickly about the downloadable free installer having the optional Google Toolbar offer in it until we removed it in 5.58. The automatic update has no user interface and therefore no third party offers - so that shouldn't be it. You had a similar problem with Dr Web last year - did they get that sorted out for you in a timely fashion?

If this is from the official website download or the automatic update then it is a false positive. Only valid detection was 26 releases ago with version 5.33. You won't find any problems with any major AV engines. The above disclaimer does not apply if you have downloaded from a "grey" or pirate website.

Free upgrades while your licence is active. If you have automatic updates switched on it will update itself shortly: ... or the "check for updates" link in the bottom right hand corner of the console will update you as well - no need to go back to the website and go hunting for the download link, etc.

Professional key also licences the portable version (for up to 3 PCs for Professional Plus) - although for the scheduling functions, smart cleaning and other Pro features, customers would usually use the regular installed version instead.

Since it was your same key that was renewed, without issuing you a new one, your existing key should have simply extended without needing to enter a new one. We'll get this fixed. I have escalated this to our database manager to see what went wrong - this looks like it was a problem at our end and not yours. This usually works seamlessly, but there is a chance that something behind the scenes broke that day. I'll be sure to keep you updated on progress.

... or click "Review Junk" in Easy Clean and uncheck "Recycle Bin" before proceeding to "Clean All"

Ahem ... yes. Of the products overdue for some love (last updated in 2018) we've done a Mac update recently (with another planned in the next few months) with Defraggler, Recuva and Speccy planned for later this year ... and a new Speccy server hopefully sooner rather than later.

Your licence runs until April 2020. Make sure that you entered your new serial key under Options > About > License Information > Register New Key if you already had an old licence on that PC. ... or if you had that problem registering earlier today, please try again - the licence server had a brief issue over lunchtime (CET) which should now be resolved.

Covered here:

Constructive criticism is always welcome. Not always fun to read - but still helpful. Can't promise that everything will move at the pace that people would like - but everything here gets read and taken into consideration. Even prior commercial decisions are subject to review if we can find a smarter (ie: less annoying) way to achieve the same objective.

TBD, but if we end up with something like @Andavari's proposed design, the concept of a "default" would only apply to the product configuration settings and third party options would require an explicit YES/NO decision - but probably without the cartoon characters.

While the folks here on the public forum can probably give you general advice on what to do, your best route would probably be customer support (support@ccleaner.com) since they can see the details of your account. What is most likely that you'll need to do though is: Go into CCleaner Options > About > Upgrade to Pro Enter your name and Copy-Paste the license key from the confirmation email of your most recent order and hit "Register" ... and then you should see your expiry date showing as sometime in 2020.

Overhauling something that has been baked into the installer since 2010 is not exactly an overnight job. There's no official date for the change to be made, and the execution may still undergo some alterations and tweaks, but the final result ... ... will most likely bear an uncanny resemblance to this.

Eating the elephant one bite at the time, the preview releases are getting the fundamentals out of the way before adding in the extra goodies - and yes, being able to live-clean the browser without closing it is one of the goodies in the pipeline.