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
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.
