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For this week's Freeware Frenzy, I will be taking a look at CCleaner v1.27. The extra C stands for "Crap", and the program's aim is just to eliminate just that. After months and months of work, games, downloading, uninstalling, surfing the web, etc, our PCs are weighed down with junk. Our hard drives are jammed full of old programs, remnants of data gone by, cookies, histories of files long gone and a host of other useless information. CCleaner allows you to purge this junk from a variety of areas in one convenient program. So let's take a look and see if it stands up to all it claims.
Installation was quick and easy after a tiny download. I appreciated how CCleaner asked my permission to install various shortcuts, and even adding itself to the right click menu of the Recycle Bin. My hard drive is 80GB currently and it has been a few months since I last reformatted and reinstalled Windows. In the mean time I have spent plenty of time using the machine. Writing this column each week means I am downloading and uninstalling software very often, so I knew that CCleaner would have no trouble finding some junk to remove. Just how much, I had no idea.
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When I first ran CCleaner, it was a simple interface with almost no learning curve, a good sign. Along the left you'll find Cleaner, Issues, Tools and Options. The Cleaner option searches your drive for various items within Windows, including but not limited to Temporary files, IE Cookies and History, Recent Documents and Log Files. It also searches for histories and unnecessary files in some of your Applications. CCleaner found Adobe, Nero, ZoneAlarm, QuickTime, Ad-Aware and others on my system, and included them in the search. I was impressed that CCleaner could implement so many existing programs without any intervention on my part.
The Issues section of CCleaner is even more useful. This searches the registry for things like obsolete entries, missing DLLs, missing shortcut references, old installers etc. When we uninstall programs, they often leave behind registry entries and other scraps on the system that we have no use for. Over time, as we build up these scraps, they can cause conflicts and take up space.
My analysis took only a few seconds and CCleaner found a total of 483MB of junk that I could remove. This included 93MB in my recycle bin, but it is still a huge number. I was surprised that I could accumulate so much junk so quickly.
The Tools section of CCleaner contains an Uninstall list, which allows you to not only uninstall apps like Windows' own Add/Remove Programs, but it also allows you to rename and/or delete entries. It also has a list of your startup programs and allows you to remove undesired apps. Quick Tip, if your system is booting too slowly, take a look here for anything that you don't need to load when you boot up. Plenty of applications tend to create an entry here without your knowledge and gum up the works.
Finally, the Options are quite sparse, but CCleaner is a simple program, designed to do one thing well. You can set CCleaner to run at startup, so your system is cleaned everyday, delete or keep selected internet cookies, add custom folders and files to be cleaned, and few other odds and ends.
So to sum up, CCleaner removes junk from your system. It's that simple. CCleaner does it quickly and easily. It searches thoroughly and gets the job done with little effort on your part. I think it is worthy of running at least once. Who knows what kind of stuff is hiding on your system that you don't know about. You can grab it at www.ccleaner.com and it is only 530KB.