The Consumer’s Corner

My computer, as well as yours, gets filled up with piles and piles of useless crap. Each and every time you visit a website, something gets saved to your disk, at least temporarily. After awhile, all this ’stuff’ starts to add up, and slow you down. Things start to act funky, and you have no clue why. Your anti virus scans are coming back clean as a whistle, as well are your anti spy-ware runs. Folks, it’s just simple clutter.

CCleaner is a free (though donations are encouraged) program designed to eliminate a great deal of that clutter, and it does a really good job. Some time ago, at a friend’s home, I was doing some maintenance on a laptop, and noticed it was just a bit sluggish (by just a bit, I mean crawling.) I’m know that the biggest problem was she hadn’t updated her adware elimination program in nearly a year, but regardless, CCleaner found 770 MB of useless garbage files, and dozens upon dozens of bad .dll files and registry files. Those are some big numbers. They can, and will cause performance issues. When I was finished, she was running well again.

The program works great on brand new, right out of the box systems do. During the installation of your operating system at the factory, tons of files and registry entries are put on to your drive, never to be used again. They’re just not needed any more. Anytime you can get rid of useless garbage, your PC will thank you, and reward you with a few less headaches.

Operation is incredibly simple; click ‘Cleaner;’ ‘Analyze;’ and ‘Run Cleaner.’ You can run it without analyzing, but I do it anyway, because I’m a strange person. Next, under ‘Cleaner’ is ‘Issues.’ ‘Analyze’ and ‘Fix.’ That’s all there is to it. Under ‘Tools’ is a useful little program uninstaller and ‘Start Up’ utility.

Just a warning, when you run the ‘Issues’ part of the program, it will alter your Windows registry, and there is a very(!) slight chance this could mess something up. CCleaner will give you the option the back up the registry, and you’ll go ahead and do that if you’re a little chicken. Heh. Also, if you play around with the Start Up utility, only remove things you can actually recognize that you don’t want opening at during Start Up. There’s lot’s of stuff there that needs to boot that you’ll have no idea what it is just by reading it’s name.

Vista friendly.

Get to CCleaning!

Official Site

–Jeremy Hobbs

ccleaner, utilities, free software, freeware, computers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.