CCleaner Clean Settings & Configuration
Now, the “System” section:
This is where CCleaner gets into the meat of what can really be optimized on your PC. The Empty Recycle Bin is a no-brainer, but the temporary file cleaning is going to have the most noticeable effect on your Windows’ performance. We’ve personally seen this folder on some people’s computers bloat up to over 1gb of data, all scrap files from old or temporary installs; Nasty. Cleaning this folder out is safe, and highly recommended.
Memory Dumps and Chkdsk fragments are basically leftover diagnostic logs that can be purged without worry, as can Windows log files. We’d be hesitant to clean out the start menu and desktop shortcuts given the fact that most people have their icons arranged just the way they like them, but if your desktop is a ‘dog’s breakfast’, you may want to do some cleanup there as well.
CCleaner leaves the “Advanced” options unchecked by default, but there’s really nothing here that is particularly scary to delete. These items will be recreated when windows uses them the next time, and the cache files regenerate themselves.
‘Custom Files and Folders’ are defined in the ‘options’ screen in the right hand menu, however the actual cleaning of those folders is enabled or disabled here.
Ready, Set, Clean
Once you’ve selected the items you’d like have cleaned, you can do one final check on what’s actually in those folders before you clean them. This is a great feature. To use it, hit the “Analyze” button and CCLeaner brings up a complete list of the contents of each of the areas to be cleaned:
That covers the areas of windows that can be cleaned by default, they’re in the same place on all Windows computers. If you’re using Windows Vista, CCLeaner will figure that out automatically and adjust the location of the folders to be cleaned to make sure it reaches them all as they’re slightly different with the release of Vista.
Next up is the “Applications” tab:
Now, this is one area of the application we’d like to see Piriform improve on. At the moment, the application options look like this:
With its usage at record levels, it’s disappointing that cleaning for Firefox isn’t included. Granted, Mozilla’s apps are easier to clean than Microsoft’s, but CCleaner would definitely benefit from including automatic Firefox cleaning.
Besides Firefox, iTunes is also noticeably missing, as are a number of other common multimedia playback apps like Real Player.
That said, Windows Media Player is one of the hardest applications to clean settings from, so it’s nice to see the latest version supported with CCleaner 2.11.
Cleaning RegEdit entries is marginally useful as well as most novice users will never have touched this utility in the first place.
After you’ve reviewed the “Applications” options and have them configured, you’re ready to hit the “Run Cleaner” button.
After hitting the button, CCleaner pops up a dialog letting you know that you won’t be able to recover the contents of the folders you’re cleaning. This is a good reminder, but given how safe the cleaning settings are to begin with, we wouldn’t too much about hitting OK and starting the cleaning process.
The next thing you notice is how fast the cleaning process is: on our test machine, the cleaning process took less a minute, very impressive.
CCleaner also informs you of how much hard drive space was freed up after the cleaning process:
Registry Cleaning with C Cleaner
By far the most downloaded PC utilities on the web are Windows registry cleaners. Some dispute the efficacy of cleaning the Windows registry on newer operating systems (perhaps more useful in Win98 & ME), but CCleaner includes one for free, so we gave it a spin.
Over time, the Windows registry can get bogged down with remnants of old program installations and broken file connections. CCleaner pretty much covers off the entire range of registry areas for cleaning, first giving you an analysis of any problems with your registry and gives you the option to repair them.
After the registry scan, CCleaner reported back that our relatively new Windows XP installation had a number of registry issues, but looking at them more closely it was pretty easy to see that they were trivial at best, mostly shared file warnings and unused file extension entries, nothing too serious. That said, if you’re having problems opening certain kinds of files with the correct program etc… the file associations could be mixed up in which case correcting them with the CCleaner registry repair functions might save you a fair bit of grief.
We decided to go ahead and hit the “Fix selected issues” button, (CCleaner lets you uncheck any items you’re not comfortable cleaning).
A safety dialog pops up asking us if we’d like to back up our registry prior to installation and we highly recommend doing so, as a little bit of WIndows ‘disaster protection’:
