Keep Your Computer Clean With CCleaner

Like a car, computers require maintenance (both hardware and software) and unsurprisingly a lot of people don’t understand how to keep their computers in good condition. As a result, people may result for expensive and bloated utility software that does little more when compared to free alternatives.

With hard drive sizes soaring into the stratosphere, it can be hard to keep track of the rubbish that might be clogging up your Windows installation. Conversely, you may have a netbook or older laptop with a relatively small hard drive where all of those temporary files and log files can start to make an impact upon performance.

So how do you rectify this problem?

CCleaner (Main Screen)

Enter CCleaner (which stands for Crap Cleaner). There’s a wide range of things you can have CCleaner scan such as (but not limited to):

• Temporary Internet files (you will need to close your browsers first though),
• Cookies,
• History,
• Temporary files,
• Memory dumps (files created when you get a “blue screen of death” or BSoD)
• Log Files,
• DNS Cache.

CCleaner (Registry Integrity)

CCleaner also has the ability to clean your registry. There is some debate over cleaning the registry but I believe that it can’t hurt to remove unneeded registry entries so long as you backup the changes before proceeding. Luckily, CCleaner gives you the opportunity to do just that before deleting the offending entries.

The great thing about CCleaner is that it is completely free and has a very small footprint (3MB download and 10MB in RAM). You can even set it to run when Windows starts but I choose to run it every so often manually.

Check it out, you might be surprised by what it uncovers.