Quick Questions re CCleaner - Installed by Third Party

CCleaner for Windows
1

Good afternoon.

I recently sent my PC out to a repair shop for some work and when it came back I found that CCleaner had been installed on it (currently running Windows 10). I’ve never come across the program before and I have a couple of quick general questions as a result.

Firstly, I found some files on my drive with names in the following format:

cc_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.reg

Basing my enquiry on the ‘cc’ prefix and the extension ‘REG’ would I be correct in thinking these are files that CCleaner has created? If yes, what do they contain? Do I need to hang on to them or is it OK to delete them?

My second question is fairly basic, namely how long should it typically take to run a CCleaner scan/clean (system has new SSD and a clean install of Windows 10)?

I would be very grateful for some help with these questions.

2

Hi @Bianco

A ‘.reg’ file is a plain text file that contains instructions for making changes to the Windows Registry. These files can be used to add, modify, or delete registry keys and values.

It is probable that these are backups created by CCleaner if someone ran the Registry Cleaner tool and saved backups of what they were removing in case they wanted to undo that change.
cc_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.reg is the naming format used for CCleaners backups of registry changes. I just made this one:
image

If someone was doing reg cleaning cautiously, as they should do, then they will have done a bit at a time creating a backup for each change.*

If the computer is running OK then they can be deleted, but you may want to leave it a month or so just to be sure you (or the shop) don’t need to put one back.

*NOTE that if you double click on a ‘.reg’ file then it will install the contents of that file into your Registry. With the CCleaner registry changes backups thats how you undo the changes you made if they turn out to have been a wrong choice.

PS. You shouldn’t really be running the Registry Cleaner unless you are familiar with how the registry works.
It’s an advanced tool for trying to fix a computer that isn’t working properly, it is not a cleaning tool for general use. (People can and do break their computers by using a reg cleaner without really knowing what they are doing).

How long should a clean take is a bit of a piece of string question.

It’s going to depend on if you use Health Check or Custom Clean, what there is to clean, how long since you last ran CCleaner, etc.
Health Check does other things than just cleaning. eg, it checks for software updates too.
Custom Clean only cleans, but what you have selected to be cleaned can be different from one machine to another, and you can add other things to be cleaned.

Generally unless you have an old/slow computer then it shouldn’t take more than 15-30 seconds to open CCleaner and do a Custom Clean only.
(Just done it here, open CCleaner, run a Custom Clean, close CCleaner, took me 6 seconds).
Health Check takes a bit longer because it does other things than cleaning.

If you start using the Software Updater or Driver Updaters (at your own risk, updating drivers can cause problems) they will take longer.
The other “Tools” depend on which one you are using.