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Posted on August 25th, 2009 by Steve Cassidy
How to clean up CCleaner
No, ‘Piriform’ isn’t the name of a rare virus. Piriform is the team behind CCleaner (renamed from ‘CrapCleaner’ so that american schools could use it…) – just about the nicest, tightest, cleanest and most frequently recommended system tidyer-upper.
It’s so well regarded that some of the less well-written printer drivers suggest that you run it to clear up their mess when in the midst of a version upgrade. It’s also the proud holder of PC Pro’s Software of the Year 2008 award.
I am blogging this because Piriform commits a couple of very minor sins in the setup of the utility. One is that it tries to sneak the Yahoo toolbar in on you, unless you know to always untick the check-box; the other is that it’s king of the ultra-tiny version update. Only Winamp is worse, in my experience – hardly a week goes by without a new release, during which a moment’s inattention will land you back with the toolbar.
This may seem obsessive but I can’t be the only person who has seen people browsing on netbooks with upwards of six toolbars in Internet Explorer, and left with a browser window able to show about ten lines of text.
Anyway, Piriform has released a major update to CCleaner. It’s now on 2.22 and there’s support for cleaning out the Google Chrome cache and the Sun Java cache; just these two tricks alone are worth the clicks to get it.
Tags: CCleaner, Chrome, Piriform, shareware, utility, Windows XP
Posted in: Real World Computing, Software
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13 Responses to “ How to clean up CCleaner ”
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August 25th, 2009 at 9:20 am
You can download a slim version from their website which does not have the Yahoo toolbar. It is in the Other Build section. There is also a portable version and one that supports U3 devices.
August 25th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
I’m confused, something called CrapCleaner that by default installs crap on your pc, and you call it “very minor sins”.
I’d say that for a standard app it’s a bit bad, but for something that’s supposed to help you clean up your pc, it should automatically disqualify the product from winning any awards etc.
August 26th, 2009 at 9:45 am
I’ve used CCleaner for years on virtually every machine I encounter but had no idea there was a lite version. Steve is SO right: lots of folk have entirely pointless search bars (hopefully not CWS!)in their browsers but these folk too often have DOZENS of icons on their desktops and 50+ apps running! Last week, I saw a dual core PC with plenty of RAM utterly hobbled because it was running 76 apps…
August 26th, 2009 at 10:14 am
ho (pardon the potential Ebonics faux-pas but you give no other name): Yes, I consider a visible, untickable toolbar as a minor sin. I also wasn’t putting it forward for any awards, though if their site counter is correct and it’s been downloded over 300 million times, then they deserve at least some investigation!
Roger; I’m with you, I missed the other builds completely. The flash version (which I hope runs from a file server share too, being a traditionalist) sounds very cute – it might even be insertable in login scripts and startup items…
August 26th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
I meant the software of the year award you mentioned earlier.
I would like if any reviews in PC Pro included warnings about this kind of things being installed (I don’t think I’ve noticed anything like that before), when I get asked about some software I often use the information from your reviews to make my recommendations and it would be nice if I could then at the same time mention that they should be a bit careful during the installation.
Most of the people I recommend software too just use all the defaults during the installations and have no idea how to turn off toolbars so often end up being stuck with them until I take a look at their computer at some point later on.
August 26th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
OK… I guess this boils down to “what is a PC Pro reader” – someone who would leave all the defaults on, or not?
Do you have a preferred system cleaner-upper that doesn’t come with bloat or nagware? It’s probably mor helpful to identify an alternative you’re happy with, than throw eggs at one you’re not…
August 26th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
I have to admit that that’s a fair point, and if you would add that kind of information, I’d probably end up complaining that you were dumbing down, so please ignore my previous comment.
Never tried any system cleaner, just a general dislike of the pointless toolbars, that seems to be included with so much software nowdays (especially the Yahoo toolbar).
August 26th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
A-HA! That makes you the *ideal* tester. Please could you get CCleaner, install it without the dumb-ass toolbar, then run both the main system cleaner job *and* the registry cleaner (second tool-dock icon down), and tell us if you think it’s fixed anything worth fixing?
August 26th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Ho, software doesn’t write itself and therefore companies need some form of funding, usually in the form of addons like toolbars. If you don’t like them simply remove them from the install routine.
If you simply click, yes, next, yes, next, yes, next then you could be doing anything.
August 26th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Steve: Well, on a 2.5 year old Vista install, not counting the “Temp internet files”, Cookies or “Recycle Bin”. It found just over 2GB of files it wanted to clear out, but 15% of that was the “Windows Temp Folder” which I clear out manually sometimes. So it seems useful, but not incredibly so.
The registry cleaner found lots of stuff, but the suggested fix for everything I looked at seemed to be to delete the registry key and I didn’t dare to let it delete everything it wanted to, but I could at least clear out some things I knew what they were.
So all in all, to me it feels like a useful tool to run every year or so, but probably not useful enough for me to remember to actually do that.
Alan: I’d say that the usual way for a company to get funding is by having paying customers, though I can understand that it won’t work for all companies. However, I still think it’s wrong for a product called CrapCleaner to install crap on your pc.
August 27th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Thanks for the report: that’s what I like to see. Personally I just click “fix all issues” on the registry section – I’ve yet to be caught out by doing it. Am I right in thinking you’re not a multi-browser kind of person? It’s a lot more useful for Mozilla, Safari etc where the temp diectories can hide a bit out of reach.
I agree that the Yahoo toolbar is unwelcome: I note that the latest Java update tries to sneak it in, too.
(the only thing I’m left wondering is, what’s the hardware spec of your Vista machine, and have you ever defragged drive C?)
August 29th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I do use Firefox mostly nowdays, but it didn’t seem to find a noticable amount of stuff to clean out there (I’ve got it set to quite a small cache).
It’s a Core 2 Duo 6600, 4GB Ram, 2 * 320 GB, don’t think I’ve ever defragged anything manually on it and definitely not the last 18 months.
November 1st, 2009 at 6:42 am
I already had the Yahoo toolbar on Firefox when I started using CCleaner (free version). It has a nice (free) anti-spy program on it. I use it every day, along with CCleaner, and my computer runs like a top — very different from the way it was running six months ago.