CCleaner in Action: Cleaning the PC and Registry

So, once you’re finished backing up, you’ll see how CCleaner handles the cleaning of the registry:

This is a little ‘higher-touch’ than we’d like to see, as most users, regardless of the clarity of the explanations, would prefer to have the cleaning process “just work” and do it’s thing.

Rather than step through the registry issues one-by-one, if the utility is safe for registry cleaning, as it claims to be, we’d prefer to see it just automatically go through and do the cleanup.

Having said that, it does give you the option to “fix all selected issues” and skip the play-by-play.

Once we selected “fix all selected issues” the cleaning was so fast we wondered if it actually did anything, which may be the root of the reason why many advanced PC users doubt the effectiveness of registry cleaners in the first place. But that’s a debate for another time….

Some Extra Utility Goodies

Moving on to the “Tools” screen, CCleaner has a couple of other nice little utilities baked in that could make your WIndows life easier.

The first one is an Uninstaller utility, that helps you get rid of tough applications that aren’t typically fully removable by the control panel add/remove programs feature built in to Windows:

This feature will allow you to adjust the name of the program as well as run it’s custom uninstall function (if available) or force uninstall components if necessary.

The Startup control feature shows you all the applications that automatically load at startup on your PC. In our experience this is one of the most common reasons for slow Windows performance. Typically, a whole suite of applications are launching themselves every time you reboot and hogging your system resources, eating up available memory and processor cycles:

You can entirely remove a program from the Windows startup list, or simply disable it if you’re unsure what dependencies might be affected by deleting it altogether.

If you’d like to custom-configure CCleaner, you’ll select the “Options” button on the left-hand menu.

The first options screen is the main “Settings” screen that covers off the level of deletion you want on your removed files (how many times CCleaner overwrites the deleted files) and the usual ‘run at startup’ types of options.

We really like the “Cookies” settings screen. It allows you to specify which cookies you want to permanently keep. This is handy for your banking cookies or other important sites you visit frequently:

Next, let’s look at the custom cleaning options that can be easily set up with CCleaner…