Piriform’s CCleaner: The Step-by-Step Review & Tutorial

It’s no secret that over time both Windows XP and Vista can get horribly bogged down with temporary and residual file bloat. Today we’re going to review Piriform’s CCleaner in-depth and screen-by-screen to see if this free application is first of all safe to use, and second, how it stacks up in cleaning out and optimizing your PC.

So, without further ado, let’s take a closer look at CCleaner.

Installation and Setup

The install is really easy, not too much to think about here, download took about 20 seconds on a broadband connection.

There are, however, of options during the set up to pay attention to:

The shortcut options are pretty standard, the “add Run CCleaner to the recycle bin menu” gives permanent delete options to the right-click menu that pops up when you right click the recycle bin, kind of a nice option just have to be a little bit careful with it.

The option to add a CCleaner Yahoo Toolbar for use from the browser is a bit concerning, mostly because most users browsers are already with loaded with one type of toolbar or another, but for the purposes of this review to look closely at those features ,we’ll leave this selected.

Running C Cleaner for the First Time

Running CCLeaner from the start menu, you find the first screen:

When cleaning out your PC, the most common sources of sluggishness and poor performance are internet browser residue, old windows temporary files, document shortcuts, and a number of system-level items. All of these can be safely cleaned WITHOUT losing your saved passwords.

The first thing we want to know with CCleaner is will it delete critical files that you need when you’re online, notably your saved passwords, logins, etc…

With the internet explorer options, the only thing you may want to pay attention to is cookies . With cookie deletion, you’ll lose any automatic login sessions that go directly to a given password protected page. That said, your passwords and login names themselves won’t be affected, so you’ll just have to click login again or similar. Cookies are the number one way that advertisers track you on the web however, and can slow your PC down dramatically if there are a plethora old cookies clogging up your browser, so you’ll definitely want to clean the cookies out.

Additionally, the “temporary internet files” is also one of the main culprits when it comes to bogging down your PC. Old installation files for internet plugins and more can build up over time creating a dramatic slow down in PC performance, so it’s nice to see this included.

Update: The latest version of CCleaner (v. 2.19) now supports cleaning the browser related items in Firefox 3.5 Beta, Google Chrome, and Apple’s Safari browser.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the “Windows Explorer” section:

There really isn’t much in this list other than general housekeeping and shortcut cleanup tasks. None of these items will really affect your PC’s speed, but are good for cleaning out any confusion that may come from old, inactive shortcuts etc….

Next up, let’s look at one of the most critical sections: The “Systems” menu…