Opinions on CCleaner

My computer is not personally slow, so I don't need it, but I wanted to get people's personal opinions / reviews on this.

For the longest time (I don't know how long, but a really long time), my aunt's computer was horribly slow. When she scrolled through comments on Facebook her computer would constantly freeze. Additionally, her overall computer's speed was slow. When we stayed the night at her place that year to watch the dogs and I went on there to get on my forums, it took 10 minutes for the computer to start and another five or 10 minutes for Internet Explorer to open. Once it got going, it seemed normal-ish.

Anyway, she just recently downloaded CCleaner from a person named Kim that has these free downloads last night, and she said all of her problems have disappeared. My mom was going to get her a new computer for Christmas, but now she doesn't need to.

 

I'm guessing your aunt is the type of person who doesn't regularly clear her cookies, cache, browsing history, empty the recycle bin etc. often because that's pretty much what CCleaner does. Temporary files will definitely bog your computer down over time.

As a program in itself, CCleaner does a good job for it's intended purpose. It's really useful if you use a lot of browsers too so you can clear everything all at once.

 

My mom asked her the other day, and she said she has IE set so it clears everything when she closes it.

My mom has it set the same way on her browser.

 

What Mark said is true, CCleaner is good for inexperienced computer users--it combines a lot of the routine maintenance that more advanced users do instinctively into a nice package. In addition, over time, computers just get bogged down--if you've got years of build up, CCleaner is a good way to fight it. But it's not the holy grail of computer maintenance that some people think it is, nor do you have to run it with any kind of frequency. I run it maybe once every six months? Less now that I've been using Revo Uninstaller.

It's a handy tool but it seems to have attained defragmenting-level status as the answer to everyone's computer problems.

 

I find CCleaner as a very useful. I can't really add more to what Misty and Fate Testarossa are saying but i've found on windows 7 atleast (don't know about vista or 8) that cleaning with the internet options feature doesn't properly delete temporary internet files while CCleaner does, (so eg. youtube videoes and whatever else doesn't get deleted but CCleaner deletes them). So since it seems you want peoples opinions on CCleaner I'd say it does a great job for what it's purpose is, much better than the built in stuff.

 

It does what it says on the tin, but its no miracle cleaner. Like Misty said, its not something you'll need to use a lot...unless you're cleaning evidence from your computer. ohohoho