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What should you install when you've bought or built a new PC?

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You'll get plenty of different answers depending on if you're asking a blue shirt, an IT pro,

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or whoever the designated computer person in your family is.

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Probably you. But one thing that a lot of people say by default is C Cleaner.

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C Cleaner has been around since 2004 and it promises to clean all the crap off your PC.

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Little known fact, the name C Cleaner is short for Crap Cleaner.

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But I guess after a while the developers thought that sounded a little unprofessional.

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C Cleaner became popular because it's an easy way to clear out a wide variety of unnecessary

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data on your system at once. Whether it's browsing history, cached images, temporary files, or even system restore points,

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C Cleaner provides one place to do it. It can also get rid of registry entries that point to nothing which, let's be honest,

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they don't actually cause any problems but they're there.

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Prevent programs from starting when you boot up and it even has a secure white feature to help

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ensure that your deleted data can't be recovered. Although careful with that one.

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Oh this sounds pretty good and more importantly it's free.

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Which is probably part of the reason it's been, according to developer peer reform,

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downloaded two and a half billion times.

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Many by me. With five million desktop installs every week.

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Oh those people can't be wrong. Could they? Well as popular as C Cleaner is, there are also plenty of people that warn against downloading

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it. Even saying that it could do more harm than good. C Cleaner first started making negative headlines in 2017.

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When Avast, a company that makes antivirus software, bought peer reform.

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The same year, users noticed that C Cleaner would start collecting system information

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ostensibly for diagnostic purposes. While this is a very common thing for programs to do,

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the problem was that it would keep turning back on even after users disabled the feature,

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which didn't set well with folks concerned about privacy.

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But an even bigger story was that it was hacked around the same time,

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resulting in over two million people with compromised installations of C Cleaner

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that put spyware onto their system. A terrible look for an antivirus company whose software was supposed to clean your system.

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Not open a door for data thieves. Now this was obviously a while ago.

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And Avast did patch the security holes. But C Cleaner has faced other issues since then.

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The program has been roundly criticized for requiring users to dig through options

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if they don't want extra bundled software. You know, crap.

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Ironically installed when setting up C Cleaner. Another big problem wasn't really Avast's fault,

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but rather more of a result of how popular the program is.

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C Cleaner is available in a pro version that has a few extra features,

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like automatic driver updates, automatic cleaning of browsing data,

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and ad tracker blogging. But this pro version costs money, which led some folks to try to pirate it.

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And these pirated versions often contained malware.

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Meaning plenty of people did end up paying dearly for their free software.

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And while this is not a problem with honestly purchased copies of C Cleaner,

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wasn't a great thing to happen to a company that already had egg on its face for getting hacked.

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But current official versions of C Cleaner don't have the issues that plagued in the past,

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so should you use it? Well, the answer is still probably not.

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C Cleaner does put common PC cleaning tasks into one program, true.

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But modern versions of Windows already come with plenty of built-in tools

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for cleaning up unneeded files and deciding what programs will run at startup.

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And it's really pretty easy to just erase your Chrome data through the browser.

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It even has automatic cleaning of its own. Driver updates are also usually handled automatically by utilities that come with your new hardware.

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And seeing as most modern systems have SSDs,

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C Cleaner won't do very much to make your system more responsive.

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In a similar vein, those junk registry entries that C Cleaner and other PC tune-up programs

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warn you about won't usually slow your system down or hurt anything.

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And if the program accidentally messes with something in the registry that it shouldn't,

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say there's a blank key somewhere that a piece of software expects to be there,

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there's a chance you could end up breaking something important. So unless you have a really specific need for an app like C Cleaner,

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you're probably better off skipping it. I mean, you spend enough time cleaning anyway, so what's a few more minutes?

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Thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, check out some of our other videos,

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