I am an IT Tech working for a gov. agency doing reviews and evaluations of software and hardware as well as other networking duties. I also evaluate software as a personal hobbie. As such, I am very skeptical of "freeware" until I am able to test it out or find out more information about it. This software was recommended to me as being very useful and I am just trying to find out the "whole picture". How is this available as freeware? Are there ANY catches? It seems to be a well thought out software package with many features, but that only makes me more skeptical of it being available as "freeware". Usually that means someone is paying for it. I also did notice that it is not a restricted version and you pay for the full version type of software. It also gets good reviews so if anybody can help give me answers to how the maker is able to provide this at no charge and such, please do so. In the mean time, I will be checking it out on my secure computer set up for just this purpose.
Thanks.
Do you use Google? It is freeware, is not it? Google uses ADs to earn money, so they are trying to "force" users to use their cookies and referres, like Google Earth needs cookies and referres for "kh.google.com" or Gmail needs cookies for "google.com", so once it is allowed, google knows everything about that user. When you block cookies and referres, you are not helping to eran their money, but you can still use Google for free. So it is with CCleaner, you can donate, when you are satisfied or not, when you do not want not or you can not afford it, but you can still use it for free.
It is good to skeptic these days, there are many fake software out there, especially claiming to be free. It is all about, who do you trust. I trust CastleCops and I trust Softpedia, so when they say, that CCleaner is "clean", I use it.
In fact, CCleaner does much more better job preventing infection, than AV. Eg virus gets into the PC and put startup item to activate after startup, but when I use CCleaner before restart, it gets deleted, so AV has no job to do.
And by the way, there are many PAID software, which sends data to its developer, without even notify the user, I have noticed that a few times, when firewall alerted me.
The catch is that annoying Yahoo! Toolbar that tries to sneak onto your computer.
You can allways download CCleaner without Yahoo Toolbar.
http://www.ccleaner.com/downloadbuilds.asp
Nero also includes Yahoo, it seems, that toolbars junk is spreading around the web. 