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. While some people believe that multiple passes are necessary to irrecoverably delete files, one pass should probably be fine.

CCleaner can help protect against this by wiping the free space with its Drive Wiper tool. 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. Instead, the pointers to the files are deleted and the operating system marks the file’s location as free space. When Windows or another operating system deletes a file, it doesn’t actually wipe the file from your hard disk. You can easily re-enable a disabled autostart entry later. To avoid losing an autostart entry that may be important, use the Disable option instead of the Delete option. The Startup panel in the Tools section allows you to disable programs that automatically run when your computer starts. You can restore the deleted registry entries from the backup file if you encounter any problems.

If you do run the registry cleaner, ensure you back up any changes you make. That said, if you’re dead set on running a registry cleaner, CCleaner is one of the safer ones. Registry cleaners can accidentally remove important registry values, however, so there’s risk with little reward. The Windows registry contains hundreds of thousands of entries removing a few hundred (at most) won’t give you an increase in performance. While CCleaner does include a registry cleaner, I’d recommend against running it. 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. For example, locate the cookie in the list and click the right arrow button to add it to your whitelist. You’ll probably want to add other cookies to the whitelist, too. CCleaner will automatically add Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail cookies to your whitelist. If you find yourself always logging into your favorite websites after running CCleaner, open the Cookies pane in the Options section.ĬCleaner can help you with this whitelisting – right-click in the Cookies pane and select Intelligent Scan.

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.ĬCleaner clears all cookies by default, but you might want to keep some.

Many other options clear most-recently-used lists (MRUs) in Windows and other programs. Clearing it does free up space, but at the cost of recreating the cache later. 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.Įrasing 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. When you revisit a site, the site will load faster if images and other files are cached on your system. Browsers store these files on your system to speed up browsing in the future. You might want to reconsider clearing the browser caches (Temporary Internet Files for Internet Explorer). CCleaner clears a lot of stuff by default.

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