CCleaner - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

CCleaner developed by Piriform is a Utility program used to clean potentially unwanted files and invalid Windows Registry

Windows registry

The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components as well as the applications running on the platform: the kernel, device drivers, services, SAM, user...

entries from a computer. A public version for the Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

has been released along with a Network Edition.

Features

CCleaner supports the cleaning of temporary or potentially unwanted files left by certain programs, including Firefox, Opera

Opera (web browser)

Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...

, Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

, Safari

Safari (web browser)

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...

, Google Chrome

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on September 2, 2008, and the public stable release was on December 11, 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or...

, Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player is a media player and media library application developed by Microsoft that is used for playing audio, video and viewing images on personal computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system, as well as on Pocket PC and Windows Mobile-based devices...

, eMule

EMule

eMule is a free peer-to-peer file sharing application for Microsoft Windows. Started in May 2002 as an alternative to eDonkey2000, eMule now connects to both the eDonkey network and the Kad network...

, Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar is an Internet browser toolbar only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox .-Google Toolbar 1.0 December 11, 2000:New features:*Direct access to the Google search functionality from any web page*Web Site search...

, Netscape

Netscape (web browser)

Netscape 7 was a series of proprietary cross-platform Internet suites created by Netscape Communications Corporation and then in-house by AOL to continue the Netscape series after Netscape 6. There were three main editions released from the Netscape 7 series; being Netscape 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2...

, Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...

, Nero, Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is a family of application software developed by Adobe Systems to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable Document Format . All members of the family, except Adobe Reader , are commercial software, while the latter is available as freeware and can be downloaded...

, Mcafee

McAfee

McAfee, Inc. is a computer security company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. It markets software and services to home users, businesses and the public sector. On August 19, 2010, electronics company Intel agreed to purchase McAfee for $7.68 billion...

, Adobe Flash Player

Adobe Flash Player

The Adobe Flash Player is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer web browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other...

, Sun Java, WinRAR

WinRAR

WinRAR is a shareware file archiver and data compression utility developed by Eugene Roshal, and first released in autumn of 1993. It is one of the few applications that is able to create RAR archives natively, because the encoding method is held to be proprietary.-Developer:The current developer...

, WinAce

WinAce

WinAce is an archiving program for Windows with its own "ACE" compressed archive format and built-in support for other common archive formats types such as ZIP, RAR and MS-CAB...

, WinZip

WinZip

WinZip is a proprietary file archiver and compressor for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, developed by WinZip Computing...

, GIMP

GIMP

GIMP is a free software raster graphics editor. It is primarily employed as an image retouching and editing tool and is freely available in versions tailored for most popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux.In addition to detailed image retouching and...

and other applications along with browsing history, cookie

HTTP cookie

A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user's browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site...

s, Recycle bin

Recycle bin (computing)

In computing, the trash is temporary storage for files that have been deleted in a file manager by the user, but not yet permanently erased from the physical media...

, memory dumps, file fragments, log files, system caches, application data, autocomplete

Autocomplete

Autocomplete is a feature provided by many web browsers, e-mail programs, search engine interfaces, source code editors, database query tools, word processors, and command line interpreters. Autocomplete involves the program predicting a word or phrase that the user wants to type in without the...

form history, and various other data. The program also includes a registry

Windows registry

cleaner to locate and correct problems in the Windows registry, such as missing references to shared DLLs, unused registration entries for file extensions, and missing references application paths

Path (computing)

A path, the general form of a filename or of a directory name, specifies a unique location in a file system. A path points to a file system location by following the directory tree hierarchy expressed in a string of characters in which path components, separated by a delimiting character, represent...

. As of v2.27, CCleaner can wipe

Data remanence

Data remanence is the residual representation of data that remains even after attempts have been made to remove or erase the data. This residue may result from data being left intact by a nominal file deletion operation, by reformatting of storage media that does not remove data previously written...

the MFT free space of a drive, or the entire drive itself.

CCleaner can be employed to uninstall programs. In addition, CCleaner allows the alteration of start-up programs, similar to the Microsoft Windows MSConfig

MSConfig

MSConfig is a system utility to troubleshoot the Microsoft Windows startup process...

utility. Users can disable start-up programs. As of version 2.19.901, CCleaner also allows users to delete system restore points.

Languages

In addition to English, CCleaner is available in the following languages:

Albanian
Arabic
Armenian
Azeri
Belarusian
Bosnian
Brazilian Portuguese
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Estonian

Farsi
Finnish
French
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
Indonesian
Japanese
Kazakh
Korean
Kurdish
Lithuanian

Macedonian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese

Critical reception

CNET

CNET is a tech media website that publishes news articles, blogs, and podcasts on technology and consumer electronics. Originally founded in 1994 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie, it was the flagship brand of CNET Networks and became a brand of CBS Interactive through CNET Networks' acquisition...

editors gave the application a rating of 5/5 stars, calling it a "highly-recommended" and "a must-have tool" in spite of some minor glitches. In addition to that, CCleaner was awarded the April 2009 Editor's Choice Award by CNET.

Features

Languages

Critical reception

See also