The freeware CCleaner hasn't seen many major revisions since Piriform launched it in 2004, so when you do see a major update, you can be assured that it's going to come with impressive new tools. CCleaner 3 doesn't disappoint on that front, introducing two major new features that make it worth the upgrade.
One is a drive wiping tool that can wipe all the data from your hard drive, but can also scrub only the available free space. As with many of the tools in CCleaner, it's fairly nuanced and allows for a simple one-pass overwrite, a Department of Defense-level three-pass option, a National Security Administration-level seven-pass cleaning, and a 35-pass Gutmann-level deep scrub. The more passes you select, the slower the deletion process.
Another
key improvement to CCleaner 3 has been adding more options to
pre-existing features. You can now select specific Internet cookies to
keep, across all your browsers, while CCleaner deletes the rest in
Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. The benefit of
this is to keep cookies for specific sites that you know to be safe,
such as webmail, while getting rid of the rest that you don't want
tracking you. Note that your browser must be closed for the
cookie-deleting feature to work.
Other
changes in version 3 include improvements to the internal scanning tech
that powers CCleaner, and the interface received some minor tweaks to
make icons more visible. If you're familiar with previous versions of
the program, though, you'll be hard-pressed to find any differences
between older CCleaners and the new one. Additional minor changes
include a new native installer for 64-bit computers, and environment
variables have been added for %SystemDirectory%, %SystemDirectory32%,
and %SystemDirectory64%.
Version 3 supports more Windows programs than before, including added support for Microsoft Silverlight
Isolated Storage, AVG 2011, Audacity, LogMeIn Hamachi, BitTorrent, and
Windows Game Explorer. Pre-existing support has been improved for Google
Chrome, Internet Explorer 9 beta, and the torrent managing client Vuze.
For
users who are new to the program, in addition to browser tracks
cleaning it will clean tracks from other programs, empty your recycle
bin, delete temporary files, and clean
your Registry, quickly scanning for invalid entries before removing
them. CCleaner will also back up your Registry before you hit delete, in case it accidentally removes a crucial component. There's also a basic, somewhat rudimentary uninstaller for removing any program on your machine. What Registry entries
it doesn't catch, the main Registry checker will, but it's a two-step
process that dedicated uninstallers handle nicely on their own.
In
empirical testing, CCleaner 3 appeared to be marginally faster than
previous versions. This is probably system dependent, so users with
older computers could likely see significantly faster scan and cleaning
times than in previous versions.
Problems
with CCleaner are minor at best, and it remains a highly-recommended,
must-have weapon against system slowdowns, tracking cookies, and the
multitudinous debris that can clutter your computer.
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