CCleaner

Just installed this trial version. First job I tried was to wipe the blank part of hard drive. It stopped (not responding twice) then came back with a message that it would take 18 hours to complete. I cancelled the process.

Not a good start. Running Windows 7 Home Premium, plenty of space and other things are running fine. Using Explorer and Live Mail.

Is there some place I had better go to find out what's wrong already? Or should I uninstall and download again?

Cheers

Ros

There is no trial version. There's Free and Pro versions. http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

Here’s a guide to using CCleaner. http://www.piriform.com/docs/ccleaner

You want to wipe free space using the Drive Wiper? How many GBs free space?

How many passes did you elect? One pass is sufficient and fastest.

Thank you. It is the free version - I thought I would try before I buy the Pro. C:\drive says 857Gb free of 920. I chose the one pass option. It just went on forever all the time adding time to how long it would take to complete...then stopped altogether.

I really thank you for the link to the guide. That will help a lot. I'm quite a beginner and scared to death of this type of software. (I did have the sense to backup first.)

Cheers

Just under one gb a minute (875 gb in 18 hrs) is not actually that bad. It's not as if it's a clean vanilla write. If the live files are widely distributed across the disk then there's a lot of small holes to fill in, which adds to the time. Just run it overnight to completion.

heyros, you're using only a small portion of your (C:) partition -- so much free space to wipe.

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I've repartitioned my 1 TB HDD so that (C:) is only 94 GB -- much less to defrag and wipe. Actually wiped the 59 GB free space in 14 mins last June.

The unallocated disk space is used to create volumes that rarely need defragging or wiping (storage, etc).

Whenever you feel adventurous -- here is my prevailing method for repartitioning:

1. Have Windows disable and delete all restore points.

2. Defrag OS(C:) to migrate the files toward the beginning of the disk.

3. Shrink that OS(C:) drive to 100-200GB.

4. Enable System Restore and create a restore point on OS(C:).

Thanks for your help. I'm too much of a novice to start messing around with partitions, etc, but I appreciate your advice.

Thanks for your help. I'm too much of a novice to start messing around with partitions

Some extra info for you then: Around here we recommend making disk image backups of your system drive, the drive where Windows is installed. There's different freeware disk imaging software such as Macrium Reflect Free Edition, Drive Image XML Private Free Edition, etc., that can literally save the day if something catastrophic happens either user inflicted, from some software, or malware.