Cleaning off the crap with CCleaner

by Todd Carter (RSS feed) Jun 23rd 2005 at 12:47PM

Is crap piling up on your hard drive? CCleaner, which stands for Crap Cleaner, is a freeware cleaning tool for Windows that's worth every penny -- and probably about $24.99 more.

CCleaner's developer is constantly updating the program (just look at the extensive version history, the most recent change occuring earlier this week). A new interface makes the program even easier to use.

The program first analyzes your registry and other applications and then makes suggestions on items that are safe to remove. A recent analysis of my PC took 101 seconds and suggested items that could save 557 MB of space on my hard drive.

Most importantly, CCleaner cleans out the unused and old entries in your Windows registry. It also cleans:

Internet Explorer temporary files, cookies, autocomplete form history and URL history.
Firefox temporary files, download history and other data.
Windows temporary files, log files, the Recycle Bin and the recent documents list.
Third-party application tempoary files and recent file lists. The list of applications includes Microsoft Office, Acrobat, WinZip, eMule, Google toolbar and Netscape.

CCleaner can fix a number of PC problems, too, like unused file extensions, invalid or empty file classes, and ActiveX/COM issues. A recent scan fixed 81 issues on my computer.

The only caveat I have is that CCleaner is doing things that, while completely transparent, I'm not sure what they all mean. But the program has worked well for me for months, so I'm happy to keep my trust in the developer's hands.