Crap Cleaner Crap?

[Guest]

I've seen so many posts here and at other forums that swear by CCleaner. There site also mentions "CCleaner allows Windows to run faster, more efficiently and gives you more hard disk space."

Maybe I just don't get it but besides tidying up, I don't see any way this can give you performance gains or fix problems. Lets say your temp files, internet cache, etc total 300 megs. How will removing that used space make a difference? What if I install a game that uses a 1/2 a gig of space. The two are the same. The only improvement I can see is your defrag finishing faster.

Your thoughts?

PS I do clean my temp folder with a batch file but only cause I like things tidy.

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

well technically, cleaning out you MUI lists & history can have a performance impact -if youre running a 333 with 256 mb of ram but IMO, a modern system shrugs off things like looking up MUI items without hardly any perfomance decrease. I still have CCleaner installed and run it occasionally but i never expect to see a performance gain out of it its just to keep my system clean so i can find things.

[ripken204]

well i dont think can you state the opposite of what they are claiming, so they must be right, lol.

[CoffeeFiend]

CCleaner is great, to remove crap in general, but as for making things faster, you never heard me claim that. It just keeps things tidy.

I used to use batch files way back in the Win9x days, but that was a PITA in general. You had to keep track of every location, which changed with software versions (e.g. browser caches), and batch files were pretty limited (forget about MRUs). I can also recall the batch terminating unexpectedly sometimes, or throwing loads of error messages on files it couldn't delete (e.g. temp files in use that couldn't be deleted). With CCleaner, it just works, it does it all quite well, somebody else takes care of updating the locations (file & registry) for you already and the interface is pretty good too (there's even a preview of what'll get nuked)

[Zenskas]

PS I do clean my temp folder with a batch file but only cause I like things tidy.

Well there you go! Not useless, as for people that like things clean it helps. Also, if you install CCleaner on a PC that has gone without a reformat for years, and has an owner that is generally not "geeky" and does not already keep things clean (eg. family PC), then giving the PC a clean with CCleaner can prove to help out in performance. A lot of people (probably not many people on this forum) just don't see it, but your PC will slowly loose it's performance over time with huge amounts of background processes, task bar icons, temp files, history files, registry problems/errors, old drivers, outdated software etc. I have seen many PC's that are just loaded up with crap, and sometimes a reformat is the only way to get better performace, or at least faster than going through and optimizing/uninstalling/deleting everything un-needed.

Edited August 9, 2009 by Zenskas

[jcarle]

More often then naught, "automatic cleaners" tend to create hard to diagnose problems by erasing key files or registry entries that shouldn't be touched.

[albator]

This is not the case with ccleaner, it's not a miracle software like many stupid shareware that promise to boost you perfomance.

Ccleaner is really good, but it wont to miracle on a a computer. Also, it will allow you to backup your registry before cleaning. But I did not had

any problem with the registry cleaning and I use it since years.

[Tripredacus]

It made my computer at home faster! Of course only the first time I ran it, which removed about 7 years of "crap" so that makes sense. I say, run it every five years, presuming you can keep your OS healthy that long. That way you'll see the performance increase you've heard about so much.

[ripken204]

It made my computer at home faster! Of course only the first time I ran it, which removed about 7 years of "crap" so that makes sense. I say, run it every five years, presuming you can keep your OS healthy that long. That way you'll see the performance increase you've heard about so much.

nice one

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

It made my computer at home faster! Of course only the first time I ran it, which removed about 7 years of "crap" so that makes sense. I say, run it every five years, presuming you can keep your OS healthy that long. That way you'll see the performance increase you've heard about so much.

lol yeah ive run it on on some old slow machines i needed to bandaid back together for a few more months of use that were like that but the oldest i can think of was 5 years so you might have a record amount of crap removed there.

speaking of collected crap, I use hijackthis! on my pen drive to remove a ton of spyware from literally hundreds of machines. you know that folder called 'Backups' it creates that everyone deletes? Well i dont delete mine mine is 163mb and one day an XP install is gonna p*** me off badly and im gonna restore all the malware ive cleaned for the last few years all to the same machine. I dont know what would happen but im sure the machine will be sorry it messed with me. BWAAHAHAHAHA!

[ricktendo]

I stopped using it since I installed Windows 7, it broke my remove and my mce recordings when I was using the Beta and RC...I have not tested it on the final version of w7 cuz I dont want to reinstall all over again just because of one app

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=21852

[minotaur]

I've often run Ccleaner right after running the native windows disk cleanup utility, and CC hasn't found much more to remove, which leads me to believe that the windows utility itself does a decent job.

I never use it or any other app for registry 'cleaning'.

[sc7]

I always run CCleaner on Vista before running Auslogics Disk Defrag, because it cleans up some odd 100-300 mb worth of temporary internet files that I don't need to waste time defragmenting, only to eventually delete.

The little registry things it picks up are so insignificant, but since that scan runs fairly quickly, it doesn't hurt to keep the system tidy.

As for performance gains, on older PII era 9x machines, it may make a slight difference with MUI lists and such if they're really cluttered, but on newer hardware, you'll most likely see no real benefit.

[JustinStacey.x]

How much Crap can a Crap Cleaner Crap, if a Crap Cleaner can Crap Crap?