CCleaner Part 1
Posted by Simon Salvin on 03. Oct 2009 on PCI’ve often seen CCleaner on machines and wondered what exactly does it do??? So I decided to find out and headed over to the website for the FREE download! You can’t get better than that!
The program is a standalone program, it doesn’t run in the background or the system tray unsuspectingly, which was nice to see as so many programs add themselves to the start up and slow down PC’s considerably these days!
If you try CCleaner take care to look carefully at the options, it is a very powerful program that does exactly as it states, CLEANS!
Starting with the standard cleaner, two tabs (see screenshot above) Windows & Applications, any temporary files and folders, histories and logs, it will remove, anything you don’t want it to clean just un-tick the box, when I said previously about being careful, this really applies when clicking the Applications tab, this is where it targets your Internet browsers and they do hold a lot of info that is quite easily cleaned. 
As you’ll see above I’ve un-ticked the cookies box within the Google Chrome section, this ensures all those prefilled username boxes are still prefilled the next time I visit the site! Many users of IE use the history instead of favourites, especially the older generation, it’s the easiest to delete and causes lots of headaches, if that’s you, make sure to un-tick the box! 
Before committing yourself, hit the ‘Analyse’ button to see a list of all item types to be removed and an approximate size. If your happy to proceed go ahead and hit the ‘Run Cleaner’ button.
Any open internet browser windows must be closed to allow the temporary folders to be cleaned, don’t worry you’ll be prompted to do this.
I was informed that the C in CCleaner stands for ‘Crap’, and the program was previously called CrapCleaner, but after numerous complaints it was renamed. So if you feel like you have plenty of crap to remove then this maybe the answer???
Moving on to the Registry Cleaner, I scanned and cleaned up the registry with Registry Mechanic from PCtools, it fixed 49 errors in total, I then immediately ran the Registry Cleaner within CCleaner to find that more items had been located that required cleaning? This is where you have to draw your own conclusions, did Registry Mechanic do a bad job? Did CCleaner find things that didn’t really need cleaning? Or just like protecting you’re PC with anti virus and anti spyware, do you need more than one cleaning product installed on your PC? Where do you draw the line? That one you’ll have to decide for yourself…. 
It happily cleaned the 70 issues found and created a registry back up before proceeding, just in case an unforeseen issues were to occur.
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