The new CCleaner 7 is a downgrade and needs to serious changes.
Missing critical features:
We already have some feedbak:
Choosing the Homepage - May be added in a future update.
Scheduling and Smart Cleaning - Will be added soon in an update.
Registry cleaning - Yes many of us regard it as a stupid move to put it in Custom Clean, but they don’t seem inclined to move it out again (Personally I think Microsoft is going to start blocking CCleaner again because of it).
Disable running at startup and background running - We are told it’s not going to happen because CCleaner 7 runs as a ‘Service’ and not a Startup app:
Even disabling startup of the CCleaner service in services.msc doesn’t prevent it from running on start-up lol. Idk how else to do it, so I guess I’ll just uninstall it. It’ll probably still start-up after that.
I had CCleaner 7 uninstalled and went back to version 6.39.
It’s really annoying being a service, when it was previously an app with a performance optimizer background service… now it’s 2 background services which won’t optimize itself. It getting to be bloatware!
Also, where did all the setting options go compared to previous versions. It’s missing a lot! It even fails to clean more often, when the previous version would give you an option to close or force quit the web-brower, etc, to retry and actually clean fully.
To prevent CCleaner 7 open on startup, go to “Task Scheduler”. Then expand “Task Scheduler Library” and select “Piriform”. In the main panel, disable the task with trigger “At log on”.
If you want to control Start/Stop CCleaner (and really close), you need first go to “Services” (services.msc), search and open “CCleaner 7”, and change the Startup type to “Manual”, and then stop the service. Then, create 2 bats files, one to open and the other to close with the following sentences:
OpenCCleaner.bat:
net start CCleaner7 > nul
start “CCleaner” “C:\Program Files\Piriform\CCleaner 7\CCleaner.exe”
exit
CloseCCleaner.bat:
taskkill.exe /F /IM CCleaner.exe > nul
net stop CCleaner7 > nul
exit
You must execute with Admin privileges.
Thanks, that helps. Why they dumbed down the interface for new folks and then made a simple thing like being able to control when it runs something that only experienced folks can do I will never understand. The whole reason I liked CCleaner was because of the control I had. Why do they think folks that want to keep their PC free of clutter would want an app running constantly (which in my eyes is clutter sucking up my CPU cycles)? The only reason I keep it around if for the Driver Updater and Software Updater.
Disclaimer: This will be a long first post, presented necessarily from my own perspective and opinions. My autism and ADHD makes me a little wordy – this is not an excuse, but a reason. You’ve been warned. 
I don’t join forums but the colossal stupidity of Version 7 spurred me to actually make an account. I am a former US Government intelligence analyst and operative, and have been using and building computers since the mid-1970s. In my opinion, CCleaner is careening headlong along the same path that has claimed Symantec/Norton, McAfee, and AVG – ironically, CCleaner’s “partner” whose nagware appears at installation as clickbait. I refer to this path as Virushood. I know it’s not a virus, but it fills the same slot if I cannot control it or know what it’s doing.
I dumped AVG because AVG wanted to take over all my browser settings as an “organizational management” operation, thereby not allowing me, the owner of the PC, to make my own settings or customizations. One need only to struggle through trying to run EBay sales in South African Rand when AVG randomly sets their PC location from the American Southwest to Johannesburg, South Africa – and will not let them change it back because a non-existent organizational policy requires a password and organizational credentials – to understand why I jettisoned AVG and cancelled my premium account.
My own small business operations consist of (currently) six PCs doing a variety of tasks, and I used to have annual subscriptions for CCleaner for all my computers, because back then I liked its effectiveness, simplicity and functionality. But upon returning to the USA from overseas and restarting my business under a new name, I discovered that CCleaner had added “features” such as driver updater and software updater, along with a host of other things I don’t know about. These are totally opaque – I can only assume that these “features” crawl through my PC and report its contents to whatever mothership is paying Piriform to scrape user information for the marketing dollars. My intelligence training makes me VERY wary of this sort of thing, because I have seen what black-box software can do.
THEN, forcing it permanently resident in the system makes it very likely that it has become a black-box mining operation, maybe even malware, and this REALLY bothers me. I am particular about my PCs, and personally I do not appreciate a formerly trusted product now worming its way into my PC like a virus, recording and reporting unspecified information to an unknown, private corporation, reporting my driver and software versions to bounce them off of other versions from other unaccountable, faceless private corporations without my being able to turn the damned thing off. Sure, there’s a “privacy notice” and so on, but we all know who controls those – and I do not trust any corporation’s word, especially when they do things like this.
Moreover, CCleaner has been nagging me for a while now to run driver and software updates, and I cannot disable individual and very unnecessary “features” to run ONLY the cleaner. I am deluged by popup screens shouting at me to upgrade, ad/upgrade nagware notifications in my system tray, and all the rest of these work-interrupting annoyances – and now I cannot even exit the program to get away from them, without jumping through a lot of unnecessary hoop or coding batch files. This is truly idiotic.
CCleaner needs to face the fact that its software is optional, and not operationally necessary. The decision to make CCleaner an all-in-one updater, etc, along with all the rest of the unnecessary stuff, and to make ALL of it constantly running and nagging, parks it firmly in my mind into a category equal to that of spyware, along similar lines to Winamp, browser toolbars, Comet Cursor, and other bundlers of sidecar software.
So, CCleaner, please explain why a decision was made that was so colossally stupid from a customer standpoint as the decision to force yourselves on user’s computers, removing control from users for a relatively small increase in performance. Even a significant increase in revenue from advertisers is not a suitable for “my computer, my choice.”
I will be uninstalling CCleaner from all my PCs and allocating those funds – yes, I know, a drop in the ocean, so I am probably shouting into the abyss – to other products unless I can believe that Piriform will go back to being a useful utility rather than an annoying, nagware, virus-like piece of unnecessary code.
Kimo
Well said!
I shall also be uninstalling CCleaner from multiple PCs in my office, making it a policy that my users do not reinstall it and flagging it as an inclusion in my AV software.
Ever since the original developer sold out to Avast, the whole Piriform suite of applications has gone dramatically downhill and become bloatware. Becoming a ‘necessary’ service was the last straw.
So long, and thanks for all the fish!