Product Reviews

How clean is your PC? The question sounds like the high-camp clarion call for Kim and Aggie to pop round with their Marigolds and start uncovering unspeakable substances on your hard disk. And, like having listeria flowering in your kitchen, a messy computer can be a diabolical pain. The problem is, cleaning out a PC is a skilled job. Scrub too hard, and you can damage Windows, but clean too little, and it can begin to fail. According to McAfee, QuickClean V5.0 2005 will keep your computer clean and working at its best. We put it through its paces on a filthy PC.

There are several things QuickClean can do to dust down your PC. Firstly, it cleans up after you've been on the Internet. Even if you don't download anything, Windows saves a huge amount of information about what you've been doing and which sites you've visited. This data is retained to speed up surfing. When

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you return to a site, information such as repeated graphics can be quickly re-loaded from your hard disk, saving your PC the bother of grabbing them from the Internet. Not only does this data clog up your hard disk, but it can also tell snoopers a lot about you. What's more, if too many of these files accumulate, they'll slow your PC down. QuickClean cleans out these caches, reduces them in size and removes any unwelcome contents.

The application can also help you remove the fragments of programs and their associated files that can be left behind when you remove a piece of software. If these reach a critical mass, they can cause your PC to become unstable. We tried the program out on a computer with a 60GB hard disk, on which all manner of rubbish has been installed. In under five minutes, it had freed up 1.02GB of space.

QuickClean also removes redundant Registry entries - the Registry is a huge database of settings hidden within Windows. When a program is installed, it adds entries to the Registry, but when it's removed, these can be left behind. This can also lead to system instability.

When you consider the tears that a messy, cluttered and unstable PC can cause, McAfee's asking price of £18 is money well spent. It's easy to use, doesn't require a high-spec PC to run and makes a good job of freeing up space on your hard disk. So if you've installed loads of programs and everything's feeling a bit flaky, this program is what you need.