Does anyone still use tune up utilities like CCleaner?

badcrc said:

There must be tons of people who don't even know what temporary internet files are, never mind how to delete them.
What happens in that scenario - does your hard drive get full at some point ?

Almost every browser has a maximum size for it's cache, and will delete the oldest items when it reaches it. How you actually find out what the default limits are, and how you can set them varies wildly between browsers - from easy to near-impossible.

IE was easy, you could set the size in Internet Options - but who uses IE any more?

Firefox and all Chromium based browsers (Edge, Chrome, etc.) by default use a form of 'smart disk caching'. It's difficult to find any definitive information, but it appears to be limited to somewhere around 10% of your available disk space. Setting a manual limit requires delving into about:config for Firefox, or modifying the shortcuts that launch Edge or Chrome to add a cache size parameter. Both exercises are way beyond the skill set of "people who don't even know what temporary internet files are".

But even if they do nothing they shouldn't fill more than about 10% of their free space, so nothing too bad should happen.

Thanks for info Bree.

badcrc said:

There must be tons of people who don't even know what temporary internet files are, never mind how to delete them.

What happens in that scenario - does your hard drive get full at some point ?

Say you had an old laptop with a small HDD and have been using it for years with no CCleaner or Disk Clean-up malarkey ?

Hello @badcrc , I will share my experience with you and others:

In general you're right - the majority of people don't normally clean-up their computers and cannot be blamed for that. And that's why their hard drives are filled up so quick, aren't they?
I stopped using CCleaner around Creators Update and since that time, my hard disk get not more than 100 GB after updates. When all kinds of cleaning are done, it stays at 92GB plus/minus 1 GB. This is already 4 years, I guess...
Good to mention, that I basically try new programs only before clean install.

Best regards,
Ivan

Helmut said:

I use nothing now. I came to the conclusion after using Ccleaner and other similar utilities that they are largely fiddling about with trivia that makes no difference or you can do in Windows and applications. Some features actually making performance worse.

I'm with you on this. I think people run a tool and see that it's getting rid of say 145 things and think....."wow, i cannot believe this much stuff was left behind, glad this tool cleaned it all up".

From time to time, I will look at my hard drive (SSD) and think, hmmmm...a lot of space is being used, let me see what I can clean up. I usually open TreeSizeFree and look at the heavy hitters (Delete ISO's I don't need, get rid of a VM that I am not using, etc), then I run Windows Disk cleanup and get rid of the stuff that I don't need, then I usually will delete any system restore points (because I almost never go back to them). That's about the extent of my routine system cleanup.

I do understand the approach people are taking that they want to make sure that their PC's run as quickly and efficiently as possible. But I also think any time savings they are gaining via a cleanup, is more than lost in the time it takes to actually perform the cleanup. For example, maybe after spending 45 minutes running all of their tools, they gained back 13 seconds in productivity during the day. Also, if they install 600MB of tools to recover 125MB of wasted disk space...they are still 475MB in the red.

Is the juice worth the squeeze??????

Hi there
These days 100% waste of time -- they are usually also "ad ridden -- please download driver max or whatever".

If you've hosed up a Windows system simply use a clean backup from say something like free macrium. On most modern systems it shouldn't take too long.

If you don't have backups -- well I'm sure anybody on these boards have been telling people "As Nauseam" to take regular backups.

Cheers

jimbo

The times I have used ccleaner, I use it minimally.

I choose to handle cookies within the browser (how can ccleaner know which ones are important to keep?)
I definitely avoid any kind of automated registry cleaning/optimisation, I see it as a recipe for trouble. Although granted some people have told me good use cases for it.
For me cleaning is really limited to temp folder, recycle bin, and maybe windows update cache. I see windows 10 now has built in storage sense which seems perfect for this, but until I have tested this feature I am using 'cleanmgr+' which is based on the original microsoft 'cleanmgr'.

I have deprecated ccleaner because of whats happened to it since it got taken over by avast, its a big warning sign that when I load up a program its pestering me with popups.

For the patient a bit more detail about my setup.

I use vanilla cookie manager in browser to auto delete cookies after they reach a certian age, however I exempt cookies like for this site so I can stay logged in.
I have a ram disk for internet browser cache, so its cleaned whenever I reboot and also reduces nand writes.
I usually shift delete avoiding recycle bin, but every now and then I will check and empty it.
Traditionally I clean windows temp folder manually or with ccleaner, but moving this to cleanmgr+/storage sense.
My registry I like to think stays reasonably good mainly due to the fact I am very selective in what software I put on my machine, I tend to avoid most 3rd party security software and software that "optimises" the system.