Would you consider disposing of CCleaner?
Would you consider disposing of CCleaner?
I used it to update my drivers .... it erased my sound card driver in the prrocess and eventough I reinstaled it outside the program I am still having problems (sometimes the sound card it not recognized at start up and so there is no sound)
I never had any problem with it cleaning the registry tough
I've only used CCleaner a couple of times, but I never found much value in it. I haven't installed it for years. It appears to work as claimed, though many people don't like it.
I mainly rely on Speccy by CCleaner and Recuva occasionally. Still, Speccy sometimes provides inaccurate details on certain topics.
Full disclosure... I recently faced a problem with a corrupt Windows 10 user profile that couldn't be recovered. I had to create a new one and lost a lot of system data (really frustrating). This happened around the time I was doing CCleaner scans. I didn't think about it then, but maybe it's connected?
Visit the official Microsoft PC Manager website at https://pcmanager.microsoft.com/en-us
CCleaner was handy during the XP era for tidying up leftover junk from Windows, and sometimes the Registry Cleaner helped fix unassigned registry entries. However, since Norton bought it and turned it into a filled add, I haven't used it much. Overall, Windows now cleans itself much better.
It can cause more problems than it solves, depending on the options chosen and whether you truly wanted it to tidy up that section.
Windows offers a solid method for this task (Disk Cleanup), and Microsoft has streamlined it further in Windows 11. It should handle most of what CCleaner would have done previously.
I don't see much value in using the registry cleaner feature. Keeping old or irrelevant entries only consumes storage space, and even then, they're relatively small—my Windows account entries are under 10MB. Cleaning them doesn't significantly improve performance, as this is usually for app settings and should be opened only a few times during the application's life.
Avoid adding anything unless it offers a clear advantage that native tools can't match or deliver.
In this case, I don't have CCleaner installed since Windows already provides sufficient functionality, and any extra features from CCleaner haven't proven useful in practice.
However, I do use WinDirStat for visual file size charts and 7-Zip for better compression, as these tools perform better than what's available in Windows. I also install around 11 third-party applications, but I could manage with fewer if needed.