I use CCleaner daily, as well as Norton 360. Norton keeps warning me that I have 38,000+ issues that are slowing down my Windows PC.
TODAY, AFTER USING BOTH:
Norton shows: 35 apps are slowing down my pc. 227 broken registry key found. 9.71 GB of junk files found.
My Ccleaner shows: 4 active programs slowing down my pc. 0 registry issues. Nothing left to clean after my daily use of CCleaner.
Which app do I follow these suggestions for, Norton 360 or CCleaner? I’m confused. My computer is not new and slows down, but I thought CCleaner would take care of it. I have a Norton 360 screenshot displaying the alleged issues, which I can share with you - can’t attached images here.
It’s simply marketing, Norton is trying to boast that it has found and can do “more”.
Which is quite funny seing as Norton and CCleaner are sister companise and Norton is now using the cleaning routines/tools developed by CCleaner.
All software does it - “We can find/do more than out rivals” - whether you need that ‘more’ or not.
So some quick thoughts:
Norton is showing more apps that may be slowing down your computer.
But it’s lumping backgroud apps and startup apps together whereas CCleaner has them in seperate sections to give more control. (Performance Optimiser, Options>Startup (4-tabs of startup apps).
Registry entries can, and should, be left alone.
Cleaning the Registry will not speed up your computer in the slightest, it will only save a couple of KB of disk space, and if you remove the wrong registry entry you can break or even brick your computer.
See Microsoft’s advice about not using registry cleaners:
Junk files are somewhat subjective, what is junk for one person is wanted by another.
ALL cleaners clean different things depending on what the app developers think should be cleaned.
CCleaners Health Check will do an ‘Average’ clean of the junk most people want to clear, but it isn’t as thorough as you could get, so you have the choice to use Custom Clean which can do more.
CCleaners Custom Clean lets you choose in more detail what junk to clean and what not to clean, the Winapp2 adition lets you choose even more things to be cleaned or not.
How ‘Deep’ you want to clean is up to you.
I recently looked at a newly released cleaner and that does find more junk than CCleaner does - but looking at what ‘extra’ it had found it was things that I would not regard as needing removal anyway. A lot of what it would remove are files that would then need to be created.
So not really saving much disc space except temporarily, and you have to ask if removing files and putting them back all the time is just using up your drives write cycles?
Honestly, I’ve seen Norton 360 milking me for extra money for extra things CCleaner already does for me. And I’m not talking about $5 here and there, I’m talking about $50+ per made up things.
I’ve been using CCleaner for decades. Norton 360 used to be a nice, honest app but in the last couple of years they’ve been promoting things and their customer support is gone! Whenever I had an issue in the past, I used to contact them and immediately got a human to help me, now it’s all AI!!!
All 3rd party AV’s have realised that they are generally uneeded now that Windows Security/Defender is there as standard and performs as well as or better than most of them.
So they are fighting a last ditch battle for the mass market by ‘adding on’ cleaners, updaters, and all those other tools that you don’t really need. (and are often there in Windows anyway if you do want them).
There are still specialist and business uses for 3rd party AV’s, but for their traditional mass market of home users they are no longer really needed.
Some users haven’t fully realised that yet though, and of course some still prefer the AV they have been using for years, which is understandable and fair enough.
I think of it a bit like car radios - once manufacturers started fitting them as standard, then fitting better systems, the 3rd party in-car radio/entertainment market declined and dissapeared.
How many people do you know who would buy an after market car entertainment system when there is one already built into the car by the manufacture?
(Some people do still fit a booming sound system in their car as well as the manufacturers built in system, but not your mass market average car driver - there are always special cases).
It’s all true… Norton is behaving like a ‘nice girl’ of the night by the corner waiting to fish someone with lots of money. It’s sad, they used to be honest.
Thanks for your quick reply about my issues. This community is amazing!
