CCleaner: Admin vs User?

[mikemqa]

Well, I'm new here, heard about you at annoyances.org. I read the FAQ and have 2 questions.

 

First Q: Does CCleaner, in fact, delete ALL references to all websites/URLs visited, mainly ALL Index.dat entries?

 

Second Q: Deals with administrator vs User accounts. I've got WinXP/SP2/Home and IE 6.0. I have an Administrator account and a Limited User account in XP. I use the Limited User account for most of my web surfing and this is the account data (Index.dat) that I would mainly want to delete. (I only use the Admin account for quick, *important* downloads, updates from MS, Earthlink, etc.)

My guess is that I would have to log in as the Limited User account, then run the CCleaner. BUT, will that then result in the actual DELETION of all my Limited User's website visits/URL data, TIF, History, Cookies, etc--and most importantly the Index.dat entries in the many places they occur for my Limited User account?

If not, what would I do to get this done?

 

Thanks, Mike

[Andavari]

With your Admin account you shouldn't have any problems with CCleaner removing all the junk it can remove. As for erasing your web history in your browsers there's a forum member who couldn't get the drop down site history to remove no matter if he used CCleaner or some other utility that he was told to use - although you most likely won't have that problem.

 

With your Limited User account CCleaner shouldn't have any problems deleting junk files, however the registry cleaning portion ("Issues") won't be able to remove everything it lists or won't be able to remove anything it lists.

[mikemqa]

Thanks. This issue arose because of two items I read in the FAQ, pasted here:

 

Does it clean all the user accounts on the computer or just the current one?

At the moment CCleaner supports cleaning the current user's account only. This may change in a future release.

 

Do I need to be an administrator to run this?

Ideally yes. Although you can still run this as a normal or restricted user, however, some files may not be deleted.

 

---So this suggests that running it from the Limited User acct (which is the one I want to *clean*) might not fully do the trick. However, you are saying that it will, except for the registry cleaning? (And, from the FAQ, running it as the Admin won't accomplish what I want, which is to fully clean the Limited User acct.)

 

--Mike

 

 

 

With your Admin account you shouldn't have any problems with CCleaner removing all the junk it can remove. As for erasing your web history in your browsers there's a forum member who couldn't get the drop down site history to remove no matter if he used CCleaner or some other utility that he was told to use - although you most likely won't have that problem.

 

With your Limited User account CCleaner shouldn't have any problems deleting junk files, however the registry cleaning portion ("Issues") won't be able to remove everything it lists or won't be able to remove anything it lists.

 

[Andavari]

Actually you need to run CCleaner separately for each account Admin, User, etc.

 

There's allot of stuff that a Limited User account won't have the proper rights to deal with - this is Windows itself "protecting" itself and will occur using any cleaning program and not just CCleaner. However with that said to enable registry cleaning on a Limited User account you can temporary enable Admin rights for the Limited account while you're logged in as the Admin, just remember to set the Limited account back to having limited rights after you're done.