There’s more to CCleaner
than clicking a single button. This popular application for wiping
temporary files and clearing private data hides a variety of features,
from fine-grained options for tweaking the cleaning process to full
drive-wiping tools.
CCleaner is easy for beginners to use – just launch it and click the
Run Cleaner button. But there’s a lot more you can do with it.
Consider What You Delete
CCleaner clears a lot of stuff by default. You might want to
reconsider clearing the browser caches (Temporary Internet Files for
Internet Explorer). Browsers store these files on your system to speed
up browsing in the future. When you revisit a site, the site will load
faster if images and other files are cached on your system. Clearing
these will free up some space and increase your browsing privacy, if
you’re worried about that, but frequent cache cleanings can slow down
your web browsing.
Erasing the thumbnail cache (under Windows Explorer) can also slow
things down – if you open up a folder with a lot of image files, it will
take some time to recreate the cache. Clearing it does free up space,
but at the cost of recreating the cache later.
Many other options clear most-recently-used lists (MRUs) in Windows
and other programs. These lists don’t take up much space, but can be
privacy concerns – if there’s a most-recently-used list you rely on, be
sure to uncheck it.
Whitelist Important Cookies
CCleaner clears all cookies by default, but you might want to keep
some. If you find yourself always logging into your favorite websites
after running CCleaner, open the Cookies pane in the Options section.
CCleaner can help you with this whitelisting – right-click in the
Cookies pane and select Intelligent Scan. CCleaner will automatically
add Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail cookies to your whitelist.
You’ll probably want to add other cookies to the whitelist, too. For
example, locate the howtogeek.com cookie in the list and click the right
arrow button to add it to your whitelist. CCleaner will leave your
How-To Geek cookie alone, so you don’t have to log back into How-To Geek
after clearing your cookies.
Beware the Registry Cleaner
While CCleaner does include a registry cleaner, I’d recommend against
running it. The Windows registry contains hundreds of thousands of
entries; removing a few hundred (at most) won’t give you an increase in
performance. Registry cleaners can accidentally remove important
registry values, however, so there’s risk with little reward.
That said, if you’re dead set on running a registry cleaner, CCleaner is
one of the safer ones. If you do run the registry cleaner, ensure you
back up any changes you make. You can restore the deleted registry
entries from the backup file if you encounter any problems.
Manage Startup Programs
The Startup panel in the Tools section allows you to disable programs
that automatically run when your computer starts. To avoid losing an
autostart entry that may be important, use the Disable option instead of
the Delete option. You can easily re-enable a disabled autostart entry
later.
Wipe Drives
When Windows or another operating system deletes a file, it doesn’t
actually wipe the file from your hard disk. Instead, the pointers to the
files are deleted and the operating system marks the file’s location as
free space. File recovery programs can scan your hard disk for these
files, and, if the operating system hasn’t written over the area, can
recover the data. CCleaner can help protect against this by wiping the
free space with its Drive Wiper tool.
While some people believe that multiple passes are necessary to
irrecoverably delete files, one pass should probably be fine. If you’re
disposing of a hard drive, you can also perform a full erase of all the
data on the drive with this tool.
You can also have CCleaner wipe free space every time you run it by
enabling the Wipe Free Space checkbox under Advanced in the Cleaner
section. Enabling this option will make CCleaner take much longer to
clean up your system – CCleaner recommends leaving it disabled.
(Note: if you’re considering doing this with a SSD, please read this first)
Securely Delete Files
You can have CCleaner delete files securely, effectively using the
Drive Cleaner tool on each file it deletes. Bear in mind that this is
slower than deleting the files normally – that’s why operating systems
don’t securely delete files by default. If you’re concerned about
privacy, enable this option from the Settings tab in the Options
section.
Include Custom Files
If you use a program that isn’t included in CCleaner’s list of
applications, or you have a temporary file directory you want cleared
regularly, you can specify custom folders and files in CCleaner.
CCleaner will delete these files and empty these folders when you run
it.
To add a custom folder or file, open the Options section and use the
options on the Include tab. Be careful when adding folders or files; you
could accidentally add important files or folders and lose them.
The custom files you specify here are only cleaned if the Custom Files and Folders checkbox under Advanced is enabled.
Exclude Files
Likewise, if CCleaner keeps clearing something you don’t want it to
clear, you can add an exclusion in the Options section. You can exclude
an entire drive, folder, file, or registry key. You can also restrict
the exclusion to specific file extensions.
Manage Installed Programs
CCleaner’s tools include the Uninstall panel, which lists your
installed programs. This panel includes a few more features than the
default Windows one – you can rename or delete the entries here and any
changes you make will also appear in the Windows Control Panel.
You can also save the list of installed programs to a text file – an
easy way to keep a list of your installed programs in case you need to
remember and reinstall them from scratch.
Once you’ve got CCleaner set up, you can run it automatically each night or create a shortcut or hotkey to run it silently.
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