Is Using CCleaner A Bad Idea?

CCleaner is an incredibly popular tool for clearing space on your PC - but is it actually doing anything that your system can't already do on its own, and could it actually be dangerous?

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[funkysmokee]

I dunno why, but I've always called this thing CC Cleaner.

[RAMChYLD]

CCleaner is now owned by Norton (Avast bought Piriform. AVG merged with Avast. Norton bought AVG). That’s all you need to know when deciding whether or not to install it.

[SKNMI]

Id like to see a "general cleanup and maintenance" video where Anthony goes over various hardware and software cleaning tips.

[Oblivion]

I've been using Glary instead of CCleaner all this time and it seems I dodged a bullet in 2018.
They used to matter more back when you had HDDs since many of these types of software could defrag the disk.
Having things like file shredders, accidental deletion restorers, registry&system file backup/restore systems, and simple temp file cleaning is also still quite useful, even if some use cases are niche.

[chadschulz]

It was essential on XP which lacked most of modern OS's convenient tools for cleanups. And it helped remove pesky leftovers from miscoded uninstallers--something still plaguing software in 2022. But, the few times I needed to use System Restore to fix what CCleaner did finally convinced me to stop using it and never look back. Sometimes a fresh OS install is way more effective than a "cleaning", especially on a system running on only upgraded hardware and software for many, many years.

[theburntcrumpet]

This was actually quite a useful tool back in the XP days when performance started chugging. Wouldn't touch it with a barge pole now but it did make a notable difference to performance back in the day

[amn]

Back in the windows xp and vista days it had a noticeable positive impact, as well as putting a lot of tools in one place. I definitely contributed to the amount of times it has been downloaded

[a.p.spalato]

Liked your video, but from my experience and in real use, CCleaner does really help and improve performance by cleaning cache or registry, especially on older PCs with old HDDs. Every PC I serviced CCleaner did what it should. Sometimes on PCs from regular users it would clean 5 or 10 Gigs or garbage, and that definitely improved boot time and overall perfomance. Never had even One issue with it, and Im talking about 10+ years of usage, and tons of serviced PCs and laptops.

[bradm]

The Mac version of CCleaner acts like malware. If you force quit it, it opens itself again and you can't uninstall it from applications in Finder, having to find the option within the application. The kicker is that if the app bugs out and you get an error during uninstall, you have to reinstall it before the uninstall will work. Used to use it a lot on Windows until recently.

[AZ-rlpg]

Most of the time that I've used CCleaner was mainly to clear the registry of logs from free trial software. Normally when you uninstall them they leave stuff behind so that if you try to reinstall to get another free trial it will know you've already used your free time but CCleaner removes that stuff for unlimited free trials.

[DeinonychusCowboy]

It's wild to me how many people have forgotten (or weren't using computers / alive) back when these sorts of tools were actually needed because both windows and programs you installed on it treated the registry like a latrine

(To be clear, you no longer need it)

[zmbkll]

I always use ccleaner portable. Especially being in the IT field.
So many people still using HDDs and it makes a massive improvement for them

[prawny]

Combination of c cleaner and file assassin has saved a few installs for me in the past.

When malware can't or won't uninstall and nothing seems to stop it re installing you can sometimes kill the start up routine with c cleaner then use file assassin to nuke the actual folder or files.

Particularly useful for browser hijacks.

[RoosSkywalker]

I use this tool only for the registry cleanup because yes, invalid registry pointers can sometimes prevent programs from reinstalling, as well as helping with removing driver leftovers.

[icky_thump]

I used to use CCleaner religiously from the late 2000s up to about 2020. Then once the ownership changes started happening, so came the UI overhauls and the pay walling of features, and then when I heard about the grumblings of more harm then good, I was out. I will say though, that despite what you say about the registry cleanup being unneccesary, I swear anytime I had a significant amount to clear out, it INSTANTLY became noticeably more responsive atleast within the Windows desktop environment. And I never once encountered an issue with something becoming broken after doing so.

[Ramshackle]

I've used this software for many years as an IT professional for cleaning out broken installs\uninstalls from the registry. It works well in some use cases. Overall though, I agree it's not necessary anymore and given the potential compromises I don't keep it on the systems. I install it, run the tools I need, then uninstall it.

[BINX-RR]

I personally find 90% of these “optimization apps” to be dog water. The only ones worth while cost money and all they do is put all of the optimization you can do yourself into one place. I find it much easier to just use CMD for sfc/dism, defrag, and file explorer to clean up drives. There’s probably more higher level stuff to optimize the computer but I don’t know of it.

[Jelladin]

CCleaner was like the most useful tool when I did tech work at Office Depot. We were supposed to run hella scammy diagnostics and I just ran CCleaner and it improved grandma's performance and got rid of some pop ups she was experiencing. This and Adwcleaner were the kings.

[pogtuber]

I remember I used CCleaner back when I had HDDs and trash registry entries would actually slow down your PC noticeably, especially for startup. I think that's the primary reason CCleaner became popular. With modern Windows registry optimizations and blasing fast SSDs, I don't think there's really any point to installing any kind of registry cleaner as the risk of it getting something wrong greatly outweighs any reward.

[Duncan_]

I've created a few windows installers and it's notoriously difficult. Most installers don't uninstall cleanly for this reason and leave a lot of junk in the registry. Cleaning the registry once a week definitely seems to improve the performance for me even in Windows 11 with a Dell Inspiron 15 5518 but always backup the registry before you do it. Also if you're drive is nearly full like mine you can reclaim 3-4GB of space.