Your PC is full of junk files that CCleaner can easily remove – but don’t overdo it. Jane Hoskyn explains how to get the best out of this brilliant tool
One of our favourite free programs ever, CCleaner is a quick but thorough solution to the perennial problem of junk files that clog up and slow down your PC. And yet it can be too thorough, if you’re not careful. Merrily tick every box, click Run Cleaner and slope off for a cup of tea, and you may come back to find that your browser has forgotten all your passwords and some of your programs won’t work.
Like a Formula One car, CCleaner is packed with power but needs careful handling. Here, we’ll show you how to get the best out of it – without driving your PC into the crash barriers.
What to tick for a rough and ready boost
When you run CCleaner - ideally as an administrator (www.snipca.com/18465) – it opens on the Windows tab. The tab contains a list of tick boxes, each representing a type of system junk. Several boxes are pre-ticked. For a basic speed boost, click Run Cleaner to remove all the ticked junk, then restart your PC.
For a greater speed boost, tick some of the greyed-out boxes as well. DNS and Font Cache, Start Menu and Desktop Shortcuts, and all the junk under Internet Explorer (IE) can be obliterated without killing your PC. You’ll lose data such as saved IE passwords and program shortcuts, but this comprehensive clear-out will free up hard-drive space and remove stored data that hackers could possibly access, and may even give an old PC a real spring in its step.
Click Analyze to stay safe
Such a gung-ho approach may be fine for an ageing PC that you rarely use, but on your main PC it may do more harm than good. You may lose backup data, passwords and settings – for the sake of deleting a few files that actually took up hardly any hard-drive space.
To help avoid this, click Analyze first. CCleaner will delve deeper into the junk you’ve ticked, then create a list that reveals how much space each type of data takes up.
Right-click any item in the list for more information (click ‘View detailed results’), which you can save as a text file. You can then clean that item from the right-click menu, without removing any other ticked junk.
Tick more junk in Applications
CCleaner’s Applications tab collects junk created by your third-party tools. Here, you’ll find tick boxes for browser caches, Adobe Flash Player files and other junk your PC is better off without.
To add more junk-removal options, download CCEnhancer (www.snipca.com/18458). This free plug-in was created by CCleaner users who wanted to add more cleaning options, such as Skype Temporary Files and Chrome Installer - neither available by default in CCleaner.
The latest version of CCEnhancer adds dozens of tick boxes to your Applications tab, depending on which programs you’ve installed (this means you won’t get the Chrome tick boxes if you don’t have Chrome installed, for example).
Download CCEnhancer, run its portable EXE file and click Download Latest to update its definitions. Next time you run CCleaner, the Applications tab will have new options, such as Application Cache and Favicons, which are marked by an asterisk. None of the extra options are ticked by default, so tick those you want to include.
At the time of writing, CCEnhancer’s site makes no mention that it supports Windows 8.1 or 10, but it works fine on our 8.1 laptop (see the forum: www.snipca.com/18459).
Protect your passwords
CCleaner clears all your internet cookies by default, but you might want to keep the ones that automatically log you into your favourite websites.
To add an internet cookie to a whitelist, click Options and then Cookies, and type the relevant website into the ‘Cookies to Keep’ pane on the right. Also be careful about ticking too many options added by CCEnhancer. Many of these extra options let you remove passwords and browser settings that you’ll soon wish you hadn’t wiped.
The Analyze tool only lets you investigate items listed by CCleaner itself, not those added by CCEnhancer. If you’re not sure whether to delete or keep an item with an asterisk, search for information about it online.
Stop CCleaner slowing your PC
You don’t need CCleaner to ‘monitor’ your PC by running constantly in the background. This is supposed to be a feature of the Pro (paid-for)version, but you may find it happens in the free version anyway. This will only slow your PC down. Click Options, Monitoring, then untick ‘Enable system monitoring’. Also remove CCleaner from the list of programs that run when you start Windows. Download the free portable tool Autoruns (www.snipca.com/18461), scroll through its startup list for mentions of CCleaner, then untick them.
TICK EVERYTHING IN ADWCLEANER
One type of junk CCleaner can’t detect or remove is adware – and that’s where AdwCleaner (www.snipca.com/18466) comes in. This free tool is no substitute for CCleaner but it’s an essential companion, and much easier to use.
Run the portable program as administrator, click Scan and wait for the scan to complete. Then click the tabs (Folders, Files and so on) to see the malicious files found in different areas of your PC.
Don’t untick any of them! Every one of these files must be removed from your computer. Click the Cleaning button, let AdwCleaner delete your junk, and then restart your PC.
WHICH CCLEANER IS RIGHT FOR YOU?
CCleaner Free: The installable version (currently version 5.10 – as shown in our screenshots) is the most powerful free version of CCleaner. It integrates with your operating system (OS), so it can be launched from certain right-click menus and supports plug-ins like CCEnhancer.
To get it, go to www.piriform.com/ccleaner and click Download Free Version, then Free Download and then Download again. Save and run the EXE file (‘ccsetup510.exe’). There are no PUPs to worry about – all the tick boxes represent configuration options. It works in all supported versions of Windows.
CCleaner Portable: Ideal for cleaning XP PCs. Download the ZIP file (www.snipca.com/18454, second button down) using a supported version of Windows, then extract and copy the folder to a USB stick for running on your PC.
CCleaner Cloud: This new, free web-based version (www.snipca.com/18456), including stablemate Piriform tools Defraggler and Speccy, lets you clean more than one PC from any other, using an online dashboard. Ideal if you regularly use multiple PCs.
CCleaner for Android: Great free app for removing junk files from your tablet and phone (www.snipca.com/18457). There’s no genuine CCleaner for iOS.
CCleaner Pro: Don’t bother. It’s $24.95 (£16.33) for extra ‘real-time monitoring’ (pointless) and ‘premium support’ (use the forum instead: http://forum.piriform.com).